His pomposity was tolerable given the profundity of his
theories. Just the way he’d tuck in his chin with a slow wag of the head. Your poor souls, it said. Professor Marshall McLuhan
seemed most comfortable when he spoke and others listened. And what they heard
was a brilliant mind trying to make sense of the world of the 1960s and beyond.
He managed to supra-distill a far-reaching theory about communications into one sentence - the medium is the message. And it was… and is.
Gentle performer, public intellectual, bow-tied provocateur,
it became hard to know where the performances ended and the promulgations
began. More than once he suggested that people took him too seriously (“I don't
necessarily agree with everything that I say”), further inflaming jealousies of
his academic brethren.
Inside the Ivory Towers, those who had once offered
obeisance, now bemoaned a belief, perhaps rightly, that his theories were not a
testable, repeatable, or practical scientific methodology.
In the final years leading to his death, McLuhan witnessed
condemnation and belittlement of his work. But it turns out, for the most part,
that he really was right.
"We live in a global village, connected by
instantaneous electronic networks." How did he know, so confidently, sixty
years (plus) before the World Wide Web?
As an intellectual entrepreneur, he was willing to risk
where no tome had gone before. Very rare. To borrow from Kerouac, McLuhan was “like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in
the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
#marshallmcluhan #universityoftoronto #pierretrudeau #1960s
#professor #mediumisthemessage #haroldinnis #university #normanmailer #cbc
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