McLuhan's Work Research Articles

The 'Right-Looking Girl' in the Raccoon Coat: How to Read a Cliché, Like Franny Glass

The "Right-Looking Girl" in the Raccoon Coat:How to Read a Cliché, Like Franny Glass Laurie A. Rodrigues (bio) Upon the initial release of J.D. Salinger's second, long-form fictional work, Franny and Zooey (1961), Alfred Kazin, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fiedler, John Updike, and others in American literary discourse, responded negatively, expressing marked annoyance with the book's Glass family.1 To Salinger's literary contemporaries, the Glasses (first appearing in Salinger's stories for the New Yorker during the 1950s) reflected a creative indulgence, lowering the degree of Salinger's artistic accomplishment.2 Here, I explore another reason for critics' annoyance with Franny and Zooey, one that suggests a new, historically-informed understanding of Salinger's "literary deviance and irony" (Malcolm). Situated at the crossroads of the 1950s' emerging cultural debates on women's rights and institutionalized sexism, Franny and Zooey refuses to critique or promote either sociological or popular theories addressing Franny Glass's narrative-driving breakdown at Sickler's restaurant and subsequent crisis at her family home in Manhattan. This ambivalence made the text difficult to evaluate in its own time; thus, I open a new discussion of Franny and Zooey, examining its commentary on the effects of mass cultural images and representations of women. At a historical moment when feminist discourses were delimited to academe, and mass culture found currency in sensationalizing women's problems, I claim that Salinger used "Franny" and its mass culture-reminiscent narrator to reveal and review the clichés that assemble postwar femininity and womanhood; and in [End Page 120] "Zooey," the near-mythic operations of American cultural clichés are critiqued through a shift in narrative perspective, to the dismissive and mature socio-political point of view of Franny's brother, Buddy Glass. My use of "cliché" refers to the work of literary and cultural critic, Marshall McLuhan. According to McLuhan, the "cultural cliché" appears and proliferates through various media, contributing to the construction of cultural environments: cliché may appear as an homage implied by character wardrobe; in the composition of a letter; or, it may manifest as setting.3 Thus, clichés are pervasive and through the environments they construct, may eventually forge breakthroughs in cultural understanding.4 McLuhan's work on the social effects of mass culture gained prominence around the time of Franny and Zooey's release in 1961, and his work explores paradigm shifts in interpretive values that are stylistically reflected in Salinger's prose. Thus, both McLuhan and Salinger use their work to analyze (and sometimes ironize) the centrality of the cliché to American culture, society, and the relation between the two.5 For instance, Salinger cites Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" as an initial cultural cliché in defining his protagonist. This cliché not only begins to formulate Franny herself, but readers' initial interpretations of her environment and ensuing crisis: [Franny] was wearing a sheared racoon coat, and Lane, walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny's coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself. (7) Acclimating readers to Franny and her environment, Salinger adorns his protagonist with an expansive cliché for 1955: the raccoon coat. Franny's date, Lane Coutell, spots her on a train platform where she arrives to spend the weekend of a Yale football game in an unnamed college town. Lane's reaction to Franny's coat sparks Salinger's expression of the cultural capital that the garment signals for his protagonist; the coat's place in [End Page 121] fashion is key to Salinger's expression in "Franny," contributing to the narrative ground in which Franny's crisis unfolds. In 1955, Franny's coat (likely vintage, if not vintage-reproduction) would have been considered very chic.6 Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" recalls Sue Salzman, a New York socialite, whose sudden desire to find "a true raccoon" turned her personal preoccupation with pre-Depression style...

"I Want to Pump You Up!" Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, and the Biopolitics of Data- and Analogue-Flesh

"I Want to Pump You Up!" Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, and the Biopolitics of Data- and Analogue-Flesh

Digital Engagement: America's Use (and Misuse) of Marshall McLuhan

In recent years the United States has turned to digital technologies to buoy its response to anti-Americanism in the so-called “Muslim world.” At least three concepts appear to be shaping this effort. The first is a marketing-based strategy called “engagement.” The other two are derivations of Marshall McLuhan's “global village” and his aphorism that “the medium is the message.” This article focuses on the uses and misuses of McLuhan's work by foreign policy officials in Washington. It argues that their stated purpose—to empower people and further inter-cultural understanding through dialogue—is dubious. Indeed, pronouncements regarding these potentials now sit uncomfortably alongside Washington's use of these same technologies to manage dissent. By assessing digital engagement and a more general initiative called “internet freedom” (both in the light of what McLuhan, in fact, says), American aspirations involving digital communications are shown to be more than just contradictory; they are dangerously misguided.

McLuhan and Phenomenology

This article builds on the notion that McLuhan is "beyond categorization" in the sense that his thought—much like the media of communication he sought to understand—is in constant flux. Attempts to reduce the multiple resonances of McLuhan's work to an explicit "message" or text, either by erroneously assigning ready-made labels such as "technological determinism" or by uncritically worshipping an accumulation of mummified insights, are destined to fail. McLuhan should be engaged by an authentic appropriation of the possibilities inherent in his work. This requires apprehending his work as a medium (a body of thought to think from, through, and with) rather than containing hard truths to be understood explicitly. The key is to engage with his probes as explorations at the level of ground; it is about deploying his insights in order to uncover "areas of inattention"—that is, digging up possibilities for interpreting mediated reality from out of unlikely regions in his oeuvre. A mostly unexplored area of inquiry within McLuhan studies is the connection between the perceptual model of his "general media theory" and Heideggerian-inspired phenomenologies. This article brings McLuhan's media theory—grounded on the senses, embodiment, and mediation-into conversation with existential phenomenology—grounded on perception, existence, and lived-through world experience. This article plumbs an unexplored hidden existential side to McLuhan that should be examined for the mutual benefit of McLuhan studies, media theory, and phenomenology.Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode on the mechanical wave. —Marshall McLuhan (1962)Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. —Marshall McLuhan (1964)[P]henomenology [is] that which I have been presenting for many years in non-technical terms. —Marshall McLuhan (Letter to Roger Poole, July 24, 1978)

Technology and nationalism

In Canada and around the world, online communication has led to a new universal language. In Technology and Nationalism, Marco Adria argues that technology has often played a decisive but unnoticed role in shaping the ways in which citizens develop allegiances to regions and nations. Presenting three case studies that demonstrate how technology expands and strengthens regional identities, Adria uses topical examples such as advanced weapons for national defence and radio broadcasting to offer a new perspective on the internet and its developing relationship to social identity in Canada. Revisiting Marshall McLuhan's work on the ways that technologies influence societies, Adria reconsiders the effects technologies have had on Canadian regionalism and nationalism. Offering key insights into media history, the author outlines the influence that newspapers, radio and television have had in forming a mindset ready to welcome the internet age. As the digital revolution continues to shape the world into a global village, Technology and Nationalism provides a detailed and overdue reflection on the influence of technology on the social and political bonds we form and inhabit.

Marshall McLuhan and the End of the World as We Know It

Anyone who discusses modern culture has to do great deal of contemplating of invisible in obvious. O.B. Hardison, Jr. Disappearing Through Skylight ANY DIGITAL IMMIGRANT caught in social media whirlpool needs no reminder that things seem to be changing: Security experts today admit that they are involved in 'cat and game' with hackers--and it's not always clear who is cat and who is mouse (Marron). Indeed, who is cat and who is is increasingly unclear amidst mass exhibitionism of Facebook oversharing, irreverence of YouTube Poop, or spectre of Wikileaks upending global diplomacy. Truth be told, social media has effectively erased distinction between hacker and hackee, between producer and consumer of media, creating world of produser (Bruns), wherein mashup-remix ecosystem of metadata and free-floating signifiers prevails as an emerging new cultural order. Marshall McLuhan saw in his time antecedents of this new information order, writing in introduction to Understanding in 1964 that [t]he Western world is imploding.... Rapidly, we approach final phase of extensions of man--the technological simulation of consciousness, when creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to whole of human society. Although technological simulation of consciousness might be bit further down road, McLuhan's use of term could be taken to describe what we today call technological convergence. Convergence is both technical and cultural phenomenon. It is technical inasmuch as it is manifestation of advances made possible by digital computers and networking and cultural inasmuch as convergence is both response to and impetus for an emerging set of social practices that represent widespread shift toward what Manuel Castell's has labeled informationalism. In brief, informationalism has been described as technological paradigm that draws on capabilities of digital technologies to recombine elements from different sources (for example, mashup) with distributional flexibility of global internetworking. Added to those capabilities is ability of humans to use computing technology itself to create better technology and, hence, establish direct feedback loop that accelerates innovation (Moore's Law is widely cited example of this phenomenon). Comparing concept of informationalism to McLuhan's work, Felix Stalder has suggested that the medium is could today be translated to the network is (29). In other words, network as a material configuration of processes enabled through digital technology can be taken to be medium of communication. Older distinctions between different types of media remain relevant, but increasingly it is networked arrangement of discrete digital elements and artifacts (that is, nodes) working together in concert (that is, linked to one another) that represent medium under conditions of convergence--or implosion as it were. The configuration and interaction of those elements is therefore one of key structural considerations in understanding message of today's social technologies (see, for example, Barabasi). Structural considerations were central to McLuhan's intellectual engagement with communications history and became foundation for his contribution to and Media Ecology approaches that are generally associated with Toronto School of Communication. While flirting with technological determinism, Transformation Theory offers perspective on our time to remind us the 'content' of medium is like juicy piece of meat carried by burglar to distract watchdog of mind (McLuhan 18). In other words, it encourages communication scholars to seek out deep structure that underlies design and success of today's social media platforms rather than preoccupy themselves with unceasing stream of tweets emitted from Twitter or its inevitable successor. …

How the Medium is the Message in the Unconscious of `America Online'

This article explores McLuhan's famous slogan `the medium is the message' as a point of departure for examining current views of the nature of the new electronic media understood as a revolutionary form, associated with a new (`post-modern') stage of society. It argues that this slogan packs into itself more layers of meaning than he was able to articulate in a complex and nuanced theory of the media. It suggests that McLuhan's work constructs a productive idea of a media unconscious. It shows in detail how `messages' are encoded in new visual forms associated with the new electronic media, using the logo of `America Online' (AOL), an internet provider, as exemplary text. This logo carries implicit messages about the nature of these media, in a kind of dialogue with McLuhan. Messages and dialogue alike need a new space in which they can occur: a theory of unconscious dimensions of media.

McLuhan in space: a cultural geography

The first book to propose that Marshall McLuhan be read as a spatial theorist, McLuhan in Space argues that space is the single most consistent concept in McLuhan's vast and eclectic body of work. Richard Cavell demonstrates how McLuhan extended insights derived from advances in physics and artistic experimentation into a theory of acoustic space, which he then used to challenge the assumptions of visual space that had been produced through 500 years of print culture. The notion of acoustic space provided McLuhan with a heuristic probe of prodigious range, allowing him to examine critically the many social and cultural forms of contemporary media production. It also enabled him to cross over intellectually from the purely theoretical realm into that of artistic production, where his interests in radical notions of spatial production were shared by a range of avant garde artists from bp Nichol to Glenn Gould, from John Cage to the Fluxus artists - an artistic milieu in which McLuhan increasingly came to situate his work. Cavell's book is the first to examine McLuhan's work in light of this artistic backdrop, and the first to examine his contribution to Canadian studies.

McLuhan’s Canadian Sense of Space, Time and Tactility

Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Marshall McLuhan's work not been subject of many genuinely scholarly books, nor he, with few exceptions, been regarded as an artist or as a significant figure in pantheon of Canadian culture. Consequently, Richard Cavell's recently published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography is a significant addition to literature about McLuhan. In this profusely documented study of McLuhan as a theorist, Cavell seeks for an all-encompassing formula to explicate phenomenon of a quintessentially Canadian McLuhan, who had a substantial impact throughout world in 1960s and then again in 1990s. Cavell locates vision that creates such an impact in McLuhan's discovery of idea of (a percept, according to McLuhan). Acoustic become one of those phrases like global village, the medium is message and Gutenberg Galaxy, which are synonymous with his name. peculiar attractiveness of this percept is that it is simultaneously abstract and yet material, describing unenclosed and hence permitting discussions about measure, movement through space-time and speed. Acoustic as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from description of in behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist Karl Williams. Bott's idea, that auditory space has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously, immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been immersed in then-contemporary writers concerned with space, including art and architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, visual artist and designer Laszlo Mohly-Nagy and classicist Francis Cornford, author of The Invention of Space. With Ted Carpenter, co-founder of seminars and of early multidisciplinary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded idea of auditory space, christening it to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dimensional geometry and new physics. At considerable length and with copious documentation, Cavell illustrates importance of this perception to McLuhan's work and demonstrates how it made him attractive to contemporary artists in Canada, United States and Great Britain who were working in wake of modernist radical avant-garde: Duchamp, Picasso, Klee, Leger and P. Wyndham Lewis. McLuhan was also attractive to Dadaists, futurists, cubists, constructivists, abstract expressionists and surrealists. For first time, readers can see extent of McLuhan's effect on visual and conceptual art of Iain and Ingrid Baxter, music of R. Murray Schafer and concrete poetry of bp Nichol. McLuhan also influenced Quebecois intermedia artist Jacques Languirand. Readers will see part of significant role McLuhan's work played in artistic endeavours of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Dick Higgins and Fluxus group and Gerd Stern. With Cage and Cunningham particularly, McLuhan shared a special interest in and dedication to James Joyce. most remarkable aspect, and one most fully developed by Cavell, is McLuhan's influence on his Canadian compatriots. third thrust of argument in McLuhan in Space is importance of McLuhan's Canadianism. He remained dedicated to Canada in his understanding and vision of new globalized world of media. A number of Canadians influenced McLuhan: E.A. Bott, Carleton Williams, Richard Maurice Bucke, Reginald Fessenden, John Murray Gibbon, Bertram Booker and R.E. Wilson. Bucke is particularly interesting since he coined phrase consciousness, an idea that strong affinities with more abstract aspects of acoustic space and which therefore played into McLuhan's later fascination with literature of cosmic consciousness as well as his near-mystical vision of acoustic space. …

Who/What is Marshall McLuhan?

McLuhan's work intervenes in the critical area where new problems of embodiment are related to modernist and avant-garde interest in the harmonisation of the senses and the role of the artist as an engineer. McLuhan uses Joyce, the English-speaking modernists and the symbolists to intuit and explore this orientation in which electric technologies modify communication — production, reproduction and dissemination. McLuhan's ‘the medium is the message’ anticipates the present convergence of medium and message in the microcomputer. McLuhan placed on the agenda a whole new vocabulary, and consequently a new conceptual structure for the investigation of art, literature, culture and communication. His agenda penetrated academic, artistic, popular and official culture while currently a McLuhanesque vocabulary has permeated not only culture and communication studies but also media and bureaucracy. McLuhan was not a theorist, but interested in probes, percepts and affects grounded in a commitment to the traditions of classical learning adapting ancient modes of exegesis to the newly emerging world of post-electric technologies.

Rethinking ‘The Medium is the Message’: Agency and Technology in McLuhan's Writings

McLuhan's oft-cited maxim ‘the medium is the message’ is examined and it is argued that, although McLuhan can be read as a technological determinist, it is also possible to interpret ‘the medium is the message’ from within the context of a social constructivist understanding of technology, which sees society and technology as mutually shaping phenomena. Inherent to such a reading of McLuhan is an understanding of technology as the output of social processes, in which humans have agency. These themes are addressed through a review of scholarship that suggests that McLuhan is a technological determinist. an examination of McLuhan's work and those who challenge the dominant understanding of McLuhan as technological determinist. Previous research about the use of computer networks by women is used to illustrates how McLuhan can be read as a social constructivist. It is argued that communication scholarship might benefit from reliance on a broader understanding of technology and society that draws more heavily on insights gained form the social studies of technology.

Digital McLuhan: a guide to the information millennium

Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.

Marketing, Media, and McLuhan: Rereading the Prophet at Century's End

Canadian-born Herbert Marshall once was described as a contemporary Aristotle and was even declared a national resource in Canada. In 1967, everyone, it seemed, wanted to speak to them during the Year of McLuhan (Gordon 1997, p. 226). Yet, how much do marketing specialists know of his work today? Marshall McLuhan's considerable body of work-a real intellectual treasure-sadly is hidden from most marketing scholars. The purpose of this review is to help marketing scholars rediscover McLuhan. Why review McLuhan's work at this late date? Simple; many of his ideas ring more true today than they did when he first wrote them. It also may come as something of a surprise that had so much to say about marketing and that his work challenges many areas of received marketing wisdom. The once-enormously popular English professor pictured himself as a blind man tapping his cane in all directions to discover the nature of the media environment. He wanted everyone who would listen to understand that the new electronic media had radically altered the way people think, feel, and act. Above all, wanted people to understand that electronic media had changed the world forever. After lying largely dormant for almost 30 years, is being brought back into intellectual currency because he studied the very subjects that so interest educators, managers, technologists, and other members of society today. In the wake of globalization, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and other intellectual movements, no longer seems as eccentric as he once did (Benedetti and

McLuhan, or modernism in reverse

Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular 'McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world. McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as 'being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects. He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought. The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a 'modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-commodification in art, business, and popular culture. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today.

Carl Couch: Bridging Sociology and Communication

The article documents how Carl Couch used a sociological approach to conceptualize, analyze, and interpret the communication phenomena studied. It is argued that Couch's analyses offered a thorough sociological discussion and comprehensive understanding of communication issues by relating them to the study of social relationships. One major contribution of Couch's works in communication is his analyses of information technologies. Couch demonstrated the reciprocal relationships between information technologies and social structures. He corrected the technological deterministic flaw in Harold Innis' and Marshall McLuhan's work to demonstrate the interface between information technologies and social structures. To further illustrate the insights of Couch's theses, a study of the experiences of college students with Walkman listening and another study of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers' Club are considered.

A case against Alan Hirvela's case against CAI

In a recent issue of System, Alan Hirvela ( System 16, 299–311, 1988) published a plea to investigate the question of safety in using Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) based on media critic McLuhan's work and to hold off CAI until this question is answered. John Higgins (1988) provided a reply in the same issue of System without going into the details of McLuhan's teaching, nor of Hirvela's main question, that of humanistic concerns about the potential damage of CAI. The debate has been continued in System 17(1). It is argued in the present article that Hirvela quoted at least three authors out of context, thus misrepresenting their points of view. Furthermore, it is shown that McLuhan never had a case against computers in education but was rather favourable toward CAI. In any case, McLuhan is not a competent authority on the matter of the influence of computers on society in general, let alone on CAI. However, it is recognized that Hirvela's article has the merit of posing the question of, as he terms it, “humanistic” concern about the use of CAI. He could have found more fertile ground on which to base his arguments in the work of critics of artificial intelligence such as Dreyfus, Weizenbaum, or Winograd and Flores.

Marshall McLuhan and the case against CAI

Though these are still the formative years of computer-assisted instruction (CAI), an ample body of CAI literature already exists. However, this scholarship, impressive as much of it is, falls notably short in one crucial respect. Up to now the focus has mainly been on the many pedagogical questions concerning CAI. But what about the possible humanistic concerns? Specifically, to what degree is it healthy, in a number of different ways, for student to be instructed individually or en masse via computer? The following article presents some of the conventional arguments against CAI and then looks at various humanistic concerns by focusing on the work of Marshall McLuhan. Using McLuhan's work as a foundation, the article maintains that CAI is being introduced into the instructional process before proper research has demonstrated that is is not harmful for students to be exposed to this method of learning.

Marshall Mcluhan and computer conferencing

Marshall McLuhan's writing style has long been a source of fascination and frustration to the scholarly community. Instead of sequentially developed paragraphs and chapters, McLuhan's work often took the form of numerous free-standing commentaries, usually not more than a few pages in length, each self-sustaining yet revolving around some sort of central theme. This `holographic' style turns out to have much in common with the commentaries produced by participants in a computer conference, where individuals engage in multi-dimensional dialogue through comments of usually 20-60 lines of length around several related themes. The similarities in the textures of computer conferences and the books of McLuhan-who knew nothing about computer conferencing when he wrote his books-can aid in understanding both the computer conference as a literary form and the style of McLuhan.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

This reissue of Understanding Media marks thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on state of then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as the global village and the medium is message are now part of lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in last few years, fueled by recent and continuing conjunctions between cable companies and regional phone companies, appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in light of technological as well as political and social changes that have occurred in last part of this century.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in print. The reissue of this landmark book reflects the continuing importance of McLuhan's work for contemporary readers.