Marshall McLuhan book

Introduction to the Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan - Lewis Lapham

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

*Introduction to the MIT Press Edition The Eternal Now * Lewis H. Lapham

Thirty years ago this past summer Herbert Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and within a matter of months the book acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. Seldom in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret into the center ring of the celebrity circus, but McLuhan accepted the transformation as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more than the inevitable and unsurprising proof of the hypothesis that he had found in the library at the University of Toronto. He was fifty-two years old at the time

His book introduced into the language our present usage of the term media, as well as a number of other precepts, among them "global village" and "Age of Information" that since have become commonplaces, and by the fall of 1965 Understanding Media had prompted the New York Herald Tribune, speaking on behalf of what was then the consensus of informed opinion to proclaim its author "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov. ..."

For the next four or five years McLuhan toured the television talk shows as well as the corporate lecture circuit, astonishing his audiences with a persona that joined, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, "the charisma of a haruspex with the irresistible certitude of the monomaniac.

We are the television screen ...We wear all mankind as our skin

But even as McLuhan passed across the zenith of his fame, few of the people who explicated his text fully understood what it was that he was trying to say.

The alarms and excursions associated with Understanding Media didn't survive McLuhan's death (on New Year's Eve 1980, at the age of sixty-nine), and as perhaps was to be expected from artisans still working in a medium that the decedent had pronounced obsolete, the obituary notices were less than worshipful. Informed opinion had moved on to other things, and McLuhan's name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility

The judgment was poorly timed. Much of what McLuhan had to say makes a good deal more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964,

Beginning from the premise that "we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and there- after our tools shape us,"