McLuhan's Wake

"The more you get the faster you go.  The more you strive to retrieve a time before any time you've ever known."

I really enjoyed watching McLuhan's Wake, a 2002 documentary on Marshall McLuhan.  As a Gallatin student, I have studied McLuhan several times, and have even blogged about him for other courses.  He is probably one of the most frequently misinterpreted geniuses of all time.  I have stated in previous entries of this blog that I connect with his technological determinism, or at least i think I do!  McLuhan's job was to relate things that other people thought were unrelatable, reducing confusion and creating order.  It was heartbreaking to hear about McLuhan's stroke and his relative inability to communicate toward the end of his life -  how when they went to his office to collect his things, his papers were organized in such a way that they could easily be picked up and thrown out.  His whole life, and people were ready to discard it.  

I found the discussion of tools intriguing.  How every tool is an extension of the users body, sensesm or mind.  Knives extend fingernails, gloves extend the skin - "The things you make, they mimic you, though sometimes it's hard to see the resemblance… They're like you a but a you that's enhanced."  

Some people wrote McLuhan off as being crazy, others thought he was somehow pushing a Roman Catholic agenda, but I tend to agree with his wife - his brain was just too active.  I think he really honed in on the essence of advertising in a way most people weren't ready to comprehend.  He was ahead of his time, although without him back then we would not be where we are, at least in the ways we think about media and technology.  It is so fascinatingly simple to think of technology as a language, yet people were baffled and angered by McLuhan.  He worked within diverse fields which angered scholars of various backgrounds, but he eventually garnered signification respect without succumbing to the "haters."  Without giving in to the backwards norms, he seems to have become the prominent scholar in communications studies and the star of interdisciplinary collegiate programs such as Gallatin.  He is probably the most commonly taught scholar in Gallatin classes.  

Now, more than ever, his idea of the Global Village holds true.  We "no longer have to be anywhere in order to do everything.  The same information is available at the same moment from every part of the world."  It's an acoustic world, always in flux.  He was a great thinker, the first true academic celebrity, a media guru driven by his ideas.  

At the end of the film, McLuhan quotes someone whose name I couldn't catch, saying… "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."  At least that guy understood what McLuhan was talking about.