Prophet of Cool

Marshall McLuhan

His writing was clumsy, his thoughts badly organized, and even he complained that he had trouble understanding his ideas. But he persisted nonetheless, and when he died last week in Toronto at the age of 69, Marshall McLuhan was recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of the '60s. Some of his insights into the nature of television and the electronic age became conventional wisdom, and people who did not know his name confidently repeated his most famous aphorism: "The medium is the message."

What that means is that television is more important than anything it broadcasts and that critics who worry about the content of programs are missing the point. People will watch TV no matter what the shows are; it commands their attention as no other medium ever has.

In a dozen or so almost unreadable books ("Clear prose," he once wrote in one of his more penetrable sentences, "indicates the absence of thought"), McLuhan formulated his theory of communication. Primitive, illiterate man, he wrote, lived in a kind of Eden. People spoke to one another face to face; communication involved touch and smell as well as sight and sound. The invention of writing was the serpent's apple that destroyed paradise: thought was separated from feeling, and meaning was attached to abstract words instead of things. The Gutenberg printing press, which eventually led to the mass production of books, newspapers and magazines, completed the process. Literacy became commonplace, and as people got used to following lines of type on printed pages, they started thinking in a linear, sequential way. Information could be--indeed, had to be--absorbed in isolation, and that Eden-like community of direct contact was quickly abolished.

The new age of electronics, McLuhan concluded, reversed all that and brought man back to his roots. Movies and TV require use of the ear as well as the eye and demand involvement. With his penchant for catchy, if confusing jargon, McLuhan called TV a cool medium; books, by contrast, are hot. (A hot medium, he said, "allows of less participation than a cool one.") Books are also obsolescent, he believed, and once the power of print is removed, Eden will be restored. United by electronics, man will live happily in his "global village," another phrase the author contributed to the language.

Much of what McLuhan said was what Critic Dwight Macdonald called "impure nonsense," that is, "nonsense adulterated by sense." Though his sensible observations about the power of TV now seem obvious, they were angrily contested when he first made them. Others may have recognized what was happening; McLuhan was the first to say so.

Like many other radical theoreticians, McLuhan himself was happier with the old ways. Born in Edmonton, Alta., he began college with the idea of becoming an engineer. A love of literature, ironically, led him into English studies and to Cambridge University. Influenced by the writing of G.K. Chesterton, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937.

He taught at St. Michael's College, the Catholic unit of the University of Toronto, for 34 years, and except for occasional excursions, he stayed there, reading, writing, and enjoying his Texas-born wife and six children. Softspoken, amiable and amusing, with a fondness for puns, he scarcely seemed like the prophet of a new age. Butin many ways he was, and one of his favorite quotations, from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, might stand as his epitaph: "We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea." qed

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