Page 100 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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4

Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of

the media

Introduction: The media-friendly theorist

Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was arguably the single most impor-
tant media theorist of the twentieth century. Indeed, through his
willingness to engage directly with the masses via the media itself,
McLuhan was the figure who introduced the wider public to the
notion that the media required any theory at all. McLuhan’s cultural
and intellectual milieu was quite different to that which produced
the critical thinkers addressed in the previous chapters: while they
were products and self-appointed heirs of Europe’s intellectual
heritage, McLuhan was a son of the New World. Similarly, while their
readings issued from, and assumed the perspective of, Freud, Marx
and Nietzsche, McLuhan’s intellectual background was in the anglo-
phone world of literary criticism. He is not usually considered to be
a critical thinker but, after outlining his key concepts, this chapter
demonstrates that it is relatively easy to see his work as an implicit
and sometimes explicit critique of the profoundly negative cultural
impact of media technologies. In the context of our previous
discussions of the decline of auratic symbolic culture (Benjamin and
Kracauer) and the subsequent industrialization of culture (Adorno)
McLuhan’s work helps us to highlight the specific role played by
media technologies in these culturally destructive processes.
During his lifetime, and in the decade following his death,
McLuhan’s academic standing remained low. His critics accused him
of sensationalism, self-promotion and a lack of any formal rigour.
Reading McLuhan it is easy to see the reasons for this hostile
reception; his prose is often flashy, modish, abounding with (not
always successful) puns both verbal and conceptual, and his ideas are
often driven by an ‘associative’ rather than synthetic logic. Genesko
affectionately terms this provocative style ‘McLunacy’ (Genesko 1999:
3), while McLuhan himself referred to it as a mosaic or field approach.
It could be argued that both the strength and weakness of

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