Jaqueline McLeod Rogers - Finding McLuhan

FIN D I N G
M c L U HAN

The Mind / The Man / The Message

edited by Jaqueline M c Leod Rogers /

Tracy Whalen / Catherine G. Taylor

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An endeavour such as this warrants many thanks. In 2010, the editors of this volume convened a conference at the University of Winnipeg, Marshall McLuhan in a Post Modern World: Is the Medium Still the Message? We drew a small group of international scholars and invited two keynote speakers, Robert Logan and Douglas Coupland. We were joined in organizing this event by Linda Dietrick from the Department of Languages and Literatures, whose idea it was to build the conference around McLuhan. The conference was generously sponsored by the Languages and Cultures Circles of Manitoba and North Dakota, an association recently disbanded after a fifty-year history of bringing scholars from midwestern Canadian and American universities together to discuss language matters. We also received funding from the Deans Office at the University of Winnipeg, the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications, and the Department of Languages and Literatures. The success of the conference encouraged us to put out a call for proposals addressing the question of how McLuhan currently fits into a variety of interdisciplinary scenes.

During the editing of this collection, the University of Winnipeg also provided funding to support several student research assistants who helped with formatting the reference lists and contacting contributors.

We would like to thank the reviewers, who provided detailed feedback, identified sources to explore, and indicated directions to pursue, all of which resulted in better essays. We would also like to thank our contributors, who have been patient over what has been a protracted period of manuscript preparation.

Tracy and Catherine would like to extend special thanks to Jaqueline, who kept the project moving forward not only through her intellectual leadership but also by carrying out the lions share of organizational work and correspondence.

Jaqueline would like to thank those whom she interviewed for the final section of the book. Michael McLuhan was immensely helpful in sharing a picture of his father at the height of his career as a family man. Eric McLuhan was able to recreate the context of his fathers thinking and point to key terms and concepts worth another look. Douglas Coupland was extremely generous in discussing some of the challenges and pleasures of writing a McLuhan biography.

Finally, we would like to thank the University of Regina Press for its support and help. Thanks to Director Bruce Walsh, Senior Editor Donna Grant, and Acquisitions Editor Karen Clark, who was efficient, decisive, and always encouraging in offering suggestions for getting the manuscript to press. Thanks, too, to Dallas Harrison for his careful eye while editing the final copy.

INTRODUCTION

MARSHALL M CLUHAN:
TRANSFORMATIONS / ADAPTATIONS

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers and Tracy Whalen

What makes Marshall McLuhan (191180) a figure of interest in the twenty-first century?

Over the past decade, there have been increasing references to McLuhan and his media theories as scholars in a variety of fields account for the ways in which new communication technology is influencing scholarly identities and practices and altering how knowledge is made and communicated. The figure of McLuhan as a renowned international public intellectual has also been reanimated in the imaginations of many Canadians by Douglas Couplands biography, published in 2009. McLuhan is an attractive theorist for non-media specialists not only for his prescient observations but also for his ability to provide clear models or patterns. What he tells us about the history of the telegraph, for instance, continues to explain the social history of many communication devices. As an innovation in 1844, the telegraph served no prescribed purpose and was used as a toy, a device for play, yet with rapidity the instant all-at-onceness and total involvement of the telegraphic form led to huge social changes, such as the forming of a collective organization for newsgathering in 1848 as the basis of the Associated Press ( Understanding Media 33940). It is easy to transfer McLuhans broader pointthat initially we misunderstand and misapply devices that quickly go on to change our identities and livesto explain recent developments, such as the global adaptation to the cell phone, which has changed for many of us from frivolity to ever-at-hand extension.

Many people recognize phrases such as the global village and the medium is the message, and the concept of hot and cool media, even if they are not entirely clear about their meanings. But aside from these contributions to the vernacularwhich have infiltrated mainstream discourse even if they convey inchoate rather than precise formulationsthere is increasing recognition across the academy that the world anticipated and foretold by McLuhan makes sense of the world that we now inhabit. This collection addresses the question of how media and mediation processes have changed in the thirty years since his death, with an eye to how such developments and networks offer extensions of mediated practices that adhere to or depart from his predictions about technological changes and futures. It explores his enduring commitment to questions of adaptation and transformation and responds to his call to actively participate in understanding technologies.