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"The truth shall set you free," reads the inscription on Marshall McLuhan's gravestone, written in the Future Shock computer typeface popular in the '60s. McLuhan died in 1980, but his truisms have indeed freed him, if only poetically. He lives on through his axioms, in advertising taglines, the forecasts of corporate futurists, and the received truths of cyberculture.

"Much of what McLuhan had to say makes a good deal more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964," writes Lewis Lapham, in his introduction to the MIT Press's 30th anniversary reissue of McLuhan's seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Mondo 2000's tongue-in-chic non sequiturs cross McLuhan's aphorisms with The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and its User's Guide to the New Edge features a full-page head shot of the Canadian communications theorist, accompanied by a breathless eulogy ("This guy was way ahead of his time.") Wired has lionized McLuhan as its "Patron Saint." The magazine's 1993 premiere issue opened with a quote from McLuhan's collage book, The Medium is the Massage (so titled because "all media work us over completely"), scrolling over eye-buzzing, neon-bright, digitized images: "electric technology...is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life." Wired's invocations of McLuhan continue in its January 1995 issue, where the "mediologist" Regis Debray takes stock of McLuhan's intellectual legacy, and in its direct mail subscription campaign, which includes a scriptural flourish from the switched-on Gospel of McLuhan.

As McLuhan's resurrection makes clear, the cultural currency of the man Leslie Fiedler pronounced "two-thirds an absolutely fascinating analyst of society and culture and one-third mad" has yet to stabilize. In his widely-read essay on McLuhan, "What If He Is Right?," Tom Wolfe ventured, "Suppose he is what he sounds like---the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov?" Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, and Susan Sontag championed his ideas; others, many of them academic colleagues (McLuhan was a professor at the University of Toronto), were less favorably disposed toward the "Oracle of the Electric Age," as Life dubbed him. In Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, Philip Marchand notes that the "great majority of intellectuals and academics, it is safe to estimate, remained hostile to McLuhan," put off by his recondite prose style (remember, this was before French theory made impenetrability fashionable), his nonchalant attitude toward factual accuracy, and his seeming indifference to the political implications of his theories or to matters of social justice (McLuhan was more incensed by public littering than by the Vietnam war). Then, too, there was the ticklish business of his saturation exposure in the media and his often cozy relationship with Madison Avenue, perceived by many in the academy as evidence of his superficiality and venality (this was before Camille Paglia turned philosophy into a contact sport and William Burroughs shilled for Nike). McLuhan answered such charges with droll ripostes. "Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them," he told a Maclean's interviewer. "They've been asleep for 500 years, and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up."

Renewed interest in McLuhan, catalyzed by the explosive growth of the Internet, a blizzard of white noise about the Information Superhighway, and the popularity of cyberzines such as Wired and Mondo 2000, has revived the debate over his ultimate significance. To some, he remains the preeminent theoretician of the Information Age, the first public intellectual to proclaim that electronic technologies---specifically, TV, whose effects were becoming manifest as the first TV generation came of age, and computers, whose influence was beginning to be felt in the corporate workplace and the automated plant---were transforming us into post-"Gutenbergian" beings, vertiginous selves eddying crazily around a "worldpool of information" (The Medium is the Massage). To others, he is one more worse-for-wear relic of the '60s, a decade increasingly demonized by American conservatives as a breeding ground for Great Society social programs and "countercultural McGoverniks," to quote Newt Gingrich.

Before we consider his relevance to our historical moment, let's review his greatest hits. To discover McLuhan's fundamental insights, we must hack away his overgrown prose. His writing is a trackless thicket of jokes, Joycean puns, literary allusions, and cracker barrel anecdotes, at once digressive and maddeningly repetitive. It is this last quality that renders his basic theses unavoidable; formulated in the gnomic one-liners that have ensured him a postmodern half-life, they are driven home with a drumbeat insistency in his best-known works---The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage (1967), the million-selling, McLuhan Made Easy paperback that eroded his reputation among the intelligentsia even as it secured it among the masses.

Technological determinism is the keystone of McLuhan's theories. If Marx believed that class struggle was the engine of history, then McLuhan held that the engine was the engine of history: he saw technological change---specifically, new forms of communication---as the prime mover behind human history. "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication," he wrote. In other words, the medium is the message. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan juxtaposes preliterate, non-Western tribal man with Western "scribal man" (a product of pre-1500 "manuscript culture") and "typographic man" (an artifact of post-1500 "print culture") in a rambling, encyclopedic rumination on the cultural shock waves caused by the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. Preliterate man, argues McLuhan, "lives in the implicit magical world of the resonant oral word"---a mythic dreamtime in which time and space are one, "an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space" utterly unlike the rectilinear "visual space" configured by the Western, literate world-view.

A passionate convert to pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, McLuhan limned human history as a fall from grace: the phonetic alphabet was the forbidden fruit, condemning Western civilization to a postlapsarian world of isolation, objectivity, and rationality. His rendering of this event, in a 1969 Playboy interview, sounds unmistakably like Biblical allegory. The alphabet, he argues, "shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals, or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space." The invention of moveable type (the first assembly line, in McLuhan's way of thinking) and shortly thereafter the portable book (which brought solitary reading to the masses), helped foster the world-view that structured Western consciousness from the 15th through the 20th centuries. It crystallizes in the Enlightenment and attains its apotheosis in industrial modernity, where its insistence on linearity, compartmentalization, classification, detached observation, and a fixed point of view are dramatically evidenced in the Fordist assembly line, the "human engineering" of F.W. Taylor, and the panoptical design of the Machine Age factory, office, and asylum.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan announced that the Information Age---ushered in, for his purposes, by the invention of the telegraph in 1844---reversed the course of history. "After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding," he wrote. By this, he meant that the hyperaccelerated, nonlinear nature of electronic media was "demesmerizing" Western culture, snapping it out of the "typographic trance" into which the printing press had thrown it. Cybernetic culture, quoth McLuhan, returns us to the preliterate world-view---mythic rather than rational, tactile rather than visual, integrated rather than atomized. Electronic interconnectedness has transformed our wired world into a "global village" in which our lives are inextricably intertwined with each other's and with the larger drama of our culture, even our planet. "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness," he wrote, in The Medium is the Massage. "'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished...We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us."

The notion of a "global village"---the concept that, more than any of McLuhan's ideas, is reflexively invoked throughout '90s cyberculture---offers a springboard for our critique of McLuhan. It is a commonplace that the global village is upon us, made possible by computer networks, fax machines, satellite hookups, videoconferencing, and of course the telephone. But has telecommunications truly realized McLuhan's vision? Certainly, the instantaneousness of communications technologies has collapsed the distances between cultures, literally as well as figuratively. But what makes McLuhan's global village a village is not so much the interactivity enabled by its virtual commons as the sense of profound involvement that supposedly flows from our electronic interconnectedness. "In the electric age," he asserts in Understanding Media, "we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action...the electric implosion...compels commitment and participation."

TV's role in galvanizing opposition to the Vietnam war or, more recently, in mobilizing humanitarian aid for starving Somalis would seem to bear this out. Then again, the curious inertia of an international community awash, nightly, in graphic images of butchery in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Rwanda would seem to suggest that "commitment and participation" do not spring spontaneously from our electronic window on the world. Absent social consciousness and, more importantly, political will on the part of the global community, the wires that connect us are not ties that bind, merely plumbing for a deluge of images that initially jolts us, soon numbs us, and ultimately bores us. "Social service organizations and their donors complain about 'compassion fatigue,'" notes Randall K. Bush. "Not only have we seen the starving children...before, but we have also donated to relief efforts after such events before...We switch channels to something else" ("Not Global Villagers, but Global Voyeurs," The Christian Century, September 9-16, 1992). On an uglier note, the peace movement that sprang from the living room horrors of history's first TV war must be weighed against the troglodytic chest-thumping that greeted images of Iraqis barbecued alive on the Basra highway in history's first Nintendo war. The global village's epitaph is written on the Gulf War T-shirt that read, "Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas."

Of course, TV, we are told, is an outmoded, top-down, one-way medium; virtual communities, with their inherently democratic structure, are likelier candidates for McLuhan's global commons. Or are they? "'At first I thought this was Marshall McLuhan's global village coming to reality,' said Neil Harris, a manager at [a company] which sets up computer conferences and sells information to about 200,000 members around the world. 'But it's not that at all. It's a lot of people connecting in hundreds of small communities based around highly specific interests'" (John Markoff, "Locking the Doors in the Electronic Global Village," The New York Times, July 28, 1991). Jeff Salamon, writing in The Village Voice, agrees: "Contrary to grand predictions that the Internet would open up our world, it has mostly offered people the opportunity to pack themselves into ever smaller worlds, where enthusiasms mutate into obsessions, and a reality check is a parallel dimension away" ("Revenge of the Fanboys," September 13, 1994).

"We are far more deeply enmeshed with each other as inhabitants of this planet than ever before, as a result of the media McLuhan was discussing," argues Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, in an e-mail interview. "But...that doesn't mean the human condition has become rosier. We're all in on the action in Bosnia, but we can't do anything about it. The Internet, on the other hand, is important not so much for any of the truly remarkable uses it has been put to thus far, but for the way it redistributes the power to disseminate as well as absorb communication. I think you are correct to point at the atomization of interests as a disintegrative effect of the same technology that brings integration at other levels. We do connect across all kinds of boundaries. But we all pull the fabric apart in pursuit of our interests. It's a version of...the tragedy of the commons. Humans are social beings; modern citizens are individuals."

Ironically, the secession from the meatworld speaks partly to a widespread desire to reclaim the notion of community---a notion rendered increasingly obsolete by the racial, economic and political tensions that are balkanizing American culture, and by the very electronic media McLuhan believed would knit us together. The social and psychic integration he contended would result from communications technologies is belied by the fragmentation of on-line society into atomic "special interests" and by the terminal anomie (pun intended) that results from lives lived, more and more, in the electronic spaces of TV, videos, movies, computer games, BBS's, MUDs, and so forth. McLuhan's "complex and depth- structured" homo cyberneticus, "emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society," can be found in the on-line Samaritans who lept to the aid of the Cornell University student who posted an electronic suicide note, or in Amnesty International's dream of establishing a human rights network on the Internet, but these are the exceptions that prove Ballard's Rule.

In his keenly insightful introduction to the French edition of his SF novel Crash, J.G. Ballard identified "the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect," and linked the "demise of feeling and emotion" to "the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen." Those who see the virtual community as an electronic agora, restoring a sense of community and reviving public discourse in the age of the corporate media monopoly, will protest that VC's are not TV; so noted. But the bright promise held forth by VC's must be considered in the context of the culture at large, where (in America, at least) the flight into cyberspace takes place at a time when urban public space, as Mike Davis documents at length in City of Quartz, is increasingly privatized and segregated in the name of "redevelopment"; when working-class urbanites fortify what Davis calls their "prison cell houses" with bars and grates while middle-class suburbanites retreat into privately policed gated communities; when the fear of crime and a chimerical drug war are used to justify the whittling away of civil liberties; and when Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich warns of the "secession of the rich"---the abdication of social responsibility by an Information Age elite "linked by jet, modem, fax, satellite and fiber-optic cable to the great commercial and recreational centers of the world, but...not particularly connected to the rest of the nation" ("Secession of the Successful," The New York Times, January 20, 1991). In such a context, virtual communitarianism that does not bear fruit in the meatworld, as a result of on-line grassroots organizing, entrepreneurial initiatives, information exchange, consciousness-raising, and so forth, cedes the territory of the real to the powers that be and escapes to a kinder, gentler place by rolling itself up in the map. It is indistinguishable, in all the essentials, from TV escapism.

Thus, the global village has arrived, but it bears only a passing resemblance to McLuhan's Paradise Retribalized. He was wide of the mark in his contention that "electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component in his experience" (The Medium is the Massage). Western culture in the late 20th century, when we spend more and more of our lives staring at video monitors or computer terminals, is utterly dominated by "the visual component." McLuhan was resoundingly wrong, as well, in his flabbergasting assertion that TV, universally regarded as a heat lamp for couch potatoes, "demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being" and would therefore sound the death knell for "the consumer phase of American culture." (McLuhan's analysis was based on his pseudoscientific theory that the technical nature of the TV image, composed of innumerable dots, requires the viewer's "convulsive sensuous participation" to "'close' the spaces in the mesh," making the picture coherent (Understanding Media). It was wrong in his day---there is nothing sensuous or participatory about an automatic, unconscious visual mechanism---and it is doubly wrong now, when the quality of the TV image has improved many times over.)

Finally, instead of McLuhan's "depth-structured" global citizens, we witness the rise of depthless individuals whose fundamental empathy, let alone their sense of social responsibility, has been seriously diminished. Obviously, this diminution is largely the product of social, economic, political, and sometimes psychological factors, but it is aided and abetted by the electronic media that disengage us from "the consequences of [our] every action." Again, the Gulf War is a case in point. U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dick White, interviewed upon returning from a bombing run, enthused, "It was like turning on the kitchen light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying...We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them" (Robert Fisk, "Free to Report What We're Told," The Independent, February 4, 1991). A god's-eye perspective, high over Iraq, and the unreality that sets in after long immersion in the screens of a high-tech cockpit, turned bombing runs into video games. And as the tagline in a Nintendo TV spot ran, "Once you start playing, nothing else matters."

The profanity of such images stands in stark contrast to McLuhan's sublime vision, in the Playboy interview, of a global village "in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos." Nonetheless, as noted earlier, we are habitually told---often by advertisers and laissez-faire futurists---that we are living in a global village. And, in a sense that would have horrified McLuhan, we are: the viral infestation of international markets by McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Levi's, pop music, and Hollywood blockbusters is creating what Fortune has called a "one-world pop-tech civilization."

But advertisers and futurists are not the only ones who celebrate the global village. Perhaps because, rather than in spite of, the disparity between our turbulent present and McLuhan's luminous future, his ideas cast a powerful spell on fringe computer culture, where they have acquired a New Age aura. By the late '60s, McLuhan's concept of the global village had evolved into a techno-mystical vision of the "[p]sychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media," of all humankind. This planetary cosmic consciousness is not unlike the evolutionary epiphany foretold by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who proclaimed the coming of an "Ultra-Humanity" destined to converge, ultimately, in an "Omega Point"---a "cosmic Christ" who is the "consummation of the evolutionary process." In the '90s, ravers, zippies, and other members of cyberdelic culture have overlaid these ideas with a New Age eschatology that sees the wiring of the world as "the final stage in the development of Gaia," to quote the Deadhead technophile Douglas Rushkoff. Jody Radzik, identified in a Rolling Stone feature on smart drugs and rave culture as "one of the [rave] crowd's resident gurus," believes that "'[t]he planet is waking up...Humans are the brain cells. The axons of the nerve cells are the telephone lines.'"

John Perry Barlow, who often cites Teilhard de Chardin and who calls McLuhan "a meta-touchstone for all of my thoughts on media, information, and mind," asserts in an e-mail interview that "we are engaged in a Great Work, the creation of the Collective Organism of Mind on a global scale...I believe that the Internet is creating a new neurosystem which will ultimately interpose itself continuously between every human synapse on the planet and every other. 'Thoughts' are already arising in this meta-organism which are dimly perceptible to us. They will become more perceptible even as our 'own' thoughts gradually disappear into the whole." The retrofitting of McLuhan's theories, by Barlow and others in cyberdelic culture, is less misguided than it appears, at first glance. On closer inspection, it sheds light on McLuhan's deeper meaning. His quest to create an exact science of media criticism (his last, posthumous book was titled Laws of Media: The New Science) foundered on his confusingly counter-intuitive terminology (TV is a "cool" medium, the book a "hot" one) and his corkscrew reasoning (he once described a nuclear explosion as "information," and asserted that the "German Jew [was] victimized by the Nazis because his old tribalism clashed with their new tribalism"). Even so, he wrapped himself in the mantle of the objective scientific observer, insisting in the Playboy interview that as "an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory---my own or anyone else's." Later in the same interview, however, the mantle slips: he views the "upheavals" caused by the electric age, he says, "with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction." His "retribalized" technoculture, it turns out, is the sort of quietly reactionary utopia that would have gladdened the heart of one of his major influences, the Catholic intellectual G.K. Chesterton: characterized by "little radical social change," it is "essentially conservative" in nature. In Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan, Daniel J. Czitrom contends that "McLuhan expressed a personal variant of the Tory, neo-Catholic, antimodern tradition flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic." In a supreme irony, the Oracle of the Electric Age turns out to be a recovering Luddite and a closet Rousseauite, ill-suited to his office as the patron saint of Wired, a "future-friendly" magazine that celebrates the "revolutionizing [of] the old order" through technological change (Wired, 3.01).

McLuhan's unexpected resurrection, just in time for the millennium, finds him in a strange, new incarnation. He appears, in fringe computer culture, as the patron saint of the switched-on noosphere---the first theologian of information, a postmodern heir to his intellectual mentor, St. Thomas Aquinas. (His theory of communications, insisted McLuhan, was "Thomistic to the core.") Among the secular, his lasting contribution to our understanding of the world remains the revelatory thunderbolt that our technological environment shapes our world-view---that the medium is the message.

But for those who believe they are neurons in an emergent global meta-mind, he is the medium's messenger.

Copyright © Mark Dery, 1996

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