At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

What McLuhan Got Wrong about the Global Village and Some Things He Didn't Forsee

What McLuhan Got Wrong about the Global Village and Some Things He Didn't Foresee BRIAN FAWCETT AN MAY 2000,1 accepted an invitation from the Uni­ versity of Ottawa to investigate Marshall McLuhan's mistakes and over­ sights at a commemorative conference. I was invited, at least in part, because in the realm of McLuhan studies I have become "the troll"—as one critic put it years ago—who lives under the bridge that leads to the information superhighway, the metaphor for the street system of the "Global Village." I confess to liking this role, which has been evolving since my book Cambodia: A Bookfor People Who Find Television TooSlow (1986) portrayed Marshall McLuhan variously—on the road to Dam­ ascus, being kicked by irritable camels, and discussing entrepreneurial techniques with St. Paul. For all the disjunction of the approach in this book, it provided a serious critique of two of McLuhan's weaknesses: his lack of contact with ordinary life and his "gift" for public relations. Since McLuhan has not proved to be a flavour­of­the­week guru, but a thinker who had seen farther into the future than even he imagined, I had some updated remarks to make about his insights and his errors. I like my job as troll primarily because I do not have to do much beyond what I would otherwise do: steer clear of official public discourses and the disciplinary straitjackets of jargon, and keep a watching brief on the real streets and media corridors amidst which I live. For this temerity, I have been tossed squarely into the camp of those who are hostile to 208 McLuhan's ideas and approach, or who are judged to be unreasonably disturbed by the recent evolution of mass systems. I am disturbed by the recent evolution of mass systems,particularly those related to communications. These systems seem to be increasingly shaped by and driven for financial profit, and to be run by corporations that are as single­minded as reptiles. By contrast, I have always found McLuhan's slapdash style of thinking admirable and curiously efficient— in other words, everything that is good about human beings. In a sense, it is my admiration for McLuhan that has fueled my concern about the way in which mass systems are being rigged across the human community. Because I am not an academic, I have no affiliation with any of the various factions that now ride McLuhan's intellectual slipstream, and I'm also prone to ridicule these factions without being completely clear about which is which. I didn't get the opportunity to study with McLuhan, much to my regret. As it happens, however, I come from what easterners and Americans alike tend to think of as a similar locale—that snowy, utterly Canadian wasteland to the north and west ofToronto and Montreal. Beyond that, I am, methinks, quite close to McLuhan's worst nightmare: a foul­mouthed, ex­Protestant atheist,who occasionally struggles with bouts of moral earnestness. In spite of the differences, I have become, in the sanguine sense, more a student of McLuhan than a critic. It seems to me that McLuhan was a generally admirable man who could be, when occasion and his own character sideswiped him, ajerk. He was a veritable swamp of opinions and beliefs that many people today would regard as disagreeable. He was anti­Communist, homophobic, misogynist, and occasionally less than fond of some of his Jewish contem­ poraries and colleagues without being anti­Semitic or anti­Zionist; he thought that women were capable of very little ("women go downhill from the age of twelve"); he thought that most of his students and all of his university colleagues were morons; and he spewed forth an endless cascade of opinions largely unsupported by facts, but filled, nonetheless, with perceptive insights and unorthodox ideas. There are many things to like and admire about this man, so I'll list those first: 1. McLuhan was a first­rate intellectual thief. He was so good at it that it is often difficult to pin down the sources of his key ideas. 209 Among the examples of this tendency is his coining the term "Global Village," which is central to his entire project. Did he steal the term from Ezra Pound? Lewis Mumford? Or did he adapt it from Wyndham Lewis'sAmerica and CosmicMan (1948), in which Lewis writes that "The...