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This year marks the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. I was reminded of this when I came across a website yesterday called Marshall McLuhan Speaks.
McLuhan has certainly been adopted by many digital enthusiasts as a patron saint, starting with WIRED magazine back in the early 90s, and now again by proselytizers of the social web. I have been an admirer of the Sage of St. Mike’s since my high school days back in the 60s, when one of my teachers, a student of McLuhan’s, completely turned our young brains inside out by encouraging us to view history through the lens of the media. I remember in particular an exam question that asked us to “take a TV camera through the streets of ancient Rome and tell me what you see”. Blew our minds, that did.
McLuhan continues to fascinate precisely because so many of his predictions have come true, especially when you are talking about the internet. What this website does so well, aside from allowing you to hear the man himself, is shed some light on where his core ideas came from. In an articulate and succinct introductory video, Tom Wolfe reminds us that ‘the medium is the message’ was in fact an aphoristic nod to the work of Canadian scholar Harold Adams Innis. The idea was originally described in Innis’ 1951 book, The Bias of Communications. Readers of McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy will know that he acknowledged Innis as his inspiration for it.
Less known is that the prediction of what we now call the internet originated in the work of a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, de Chardin makes the prediction that one day the earth will be surrounded by something he called the noosphere, a unified field of connected ideas and thoughts brought about through the interaction of human minds. He saw this as the logical and ultimate goal of human history.
The reason McLuhan never publicly mentioned de Chardin was because the latter’s works were banned by the Catholic Church, which regarded them as a heretical interpretation of the church’s teachings. McLuhan worked for St. Michael’s, which was the University of Toronto’s only Catholic college. Clearly McLuhan, a devout Catholic, did not want to bite the hand that fed him, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently points out in his introductory remarks. Check them out for yourself. wn
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