Today, Marshall McLuhan Would Be 100

This is the conclusion of Eric Koch’s short story: Understanding Marshall.

Catherine: Now, what’s all this about the medium being the message? Does this mean that when I read a newspaper it doesn’t matter what’s in it, all that matters is that I am reading a newspaper? Isn’t your clever-clever friend profoundly mischievous when he says content does not matter?

Richard: No. He says nothing of the kind. “The Medium is the Message” is a paradox that contains many ideas. Let us just say that it says that the technology in which we receive information has a bearing on the information we receive but, in a sense, it has also become part of it.

Catherine: Do I have to take your word for this?

Richard: All you have to do is think about it. When you read a novel you have one kind of experience. When you see the same story told to you by word of mouth, it is another kind of experience. When you see it on the screen, it’s something else again. When you receive it translated into the language of computers, you are encountering a substantially different animal.

Catherine: That’s pretty obvious. So why are you making such a fuss about it?

Richard: Because every technology creates its own environment. When the message gets to us by electric circuitry we get far more information than we ever got before. The world has to find new ways of coping with this. There is a need for recognizing new patterns. In the compressed, high-speed systems in which we live, these patterns are often mythic.

Catherine: Mythic? As in Greek mythology? I haven’t noticed that. You mean primitive?

Richard: We are not afraid of that word. We don’t use it in a pejorative sense.

Catherine: Make up your mind! Are we going forward or backward?

Richard: We think the play of circuitry, of instant feedback, demands a great increase in human autonomy and human awareness. In the print era, there was a split between the head and the heart. In the electric era, this split will be healed.

Catherine: You hope.

Richard: Yes, we hope.

Catherine: What about violence? Will we have more of it? Less of it?

Richard: When people have been robbed of their identity, they become violent. That’s the way they find out who they are. They have to discover where their boundaries are, what kind of people they are confronting. So, to answer your question whether we will have more or less violence depends on the way we cope with groups who are looking for their identity and can’t find it in non-violent ways.

Catherine: You mean, we only have wars because some people are looking for their so-called identities? I’ll never believe that! Did the Germans unleash two world wars because they were trying to find out who they were?

Richard: Yes.

• • • •

The following Monday evening, a biology student named Tania Knox attended Marshall’s seminar. She was one of the first to arrive and parked in his spot. He found another spot but left a note on her windscreen. “I would be grateful if in future you did not park in my spot.” Signed, Marshall M.

She left before him and saw the message. She wrote a reply and put it in his windscreen. “Dear Professor McLuhan, I apologize. Your note was the first writing of yours I understood.” Signed, Tania Knox.

• • • •

You can read the entire story on the Stories page.