home Self-development The city as a classroom McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan

The city as a classroom McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan

Theorist of the impact of artifacts as a means of communication. Widely known for exploring the formative impact of electrical and electronic communications on the individual and society (for example, in the concept of the "global village", "absolutely ensuring disagreement on all issues" - McLuhan: Hot & Cool, NY, Signet Books published by The New American Library, Inc., 1967, p. 286.).).

His ideas are important for understanding the development of modern civilization as a global infocommunication society.

Biography

Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in the city of Edmonton (the administrative center of Alberta, Canada) into a Methodist family. Marshall is a family name used in everyday communication. In Russian sources, one can find distortions of McLuhan's surname as "McLuhan", etc.

His parents, Elsie Naomi and Herbert Ernst, were born and lived in Canada all their lives. In addition to Marshall, they had another son, Maurice, who was born in 1913. McLuhan's mother was first a Baptist school teacher and later an actress. Prior to World War I, the family lived in Edmonton, where McLuhan's father had a small real estate business. With the outbreak of war, my father was drafted into the Canadian army, where he served for about a year. In 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, the capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba.

In 1928, Marshall McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada), where in 1933 he received a bachelor's degree in engineering (electrical engineering), and in 1934 - a master's degree in English literature (English studies). During his studies, he began to publish small notes in periodicals. So, already in 1930, McLuhan's first article appeared in the student newspaper of the University of Manitoba under the title "Macalway - this is a man." The increased interest in English literature prompted him in 1934 to enter Trinity Hall College (Trinity Hall), Cambridge University (England). There he studied under the famous representatives of the new criticism I. A. Richards (I. A. Richards) and F. R. Leavis (F. R. Leavis). In 1936 he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Cambridge and after returning to North America began teaching at the University of Wisconsin (Madison, USA) as an assistant.

Marshall McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937. From 1937 to 1944 (with a short break in 1939-1940, when he went to Cambridge to get a master's degree) he taught English literature at the Catholic University of St. Louis (St. Louis, USA). There he met Corina Lewis, whom he married in 1939. They had six children.

In December 1943, McLuhan received his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled The Place of Thomas Nash in the Learning of His Time. In 1944, McLuhan returned to Canada, where in 1944-1946 he taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. After moving to Toronto in 1946, he began teaching at St. Michael's Catholic College at the University of Toronto. The main achievements of Marshall McLuhan are associated with the University of Toronto. There, in 1952, he became a professor and published most of his books. Significant influence on direction scientific research McLuhan had an acquaintance with a colleague at the university, Canadian economist Harold Innis. From 1953-1955, McLuhan was the leader of the Culture and Communication Seminars sponsored by the Ford Foundation. In 1963 he created the Center for Culture and Technology.

The scientific and journalistic activity of Marshall McLuhan, although not immediately, received wide recognition. In 1964 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 1970 an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1975, McLuhan was appointed advisor to the Vatican's Commission on Social Communication.

In the late 60s, McLuhan's health began to deteriorate rapidly. In 1967, he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, and in 1979 he had a heart attack. Marshall McLuhan died on December 31, 1980 in Toronto.

Main works

Marshall McLuhan has written many books and articles, some of them co-authored. Among his major works are The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man (1962), Understanding the Media: The Continuation of Man Outside (1964), The Media is a Massage: List of Consequences (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), War and Peace in the Global Village (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), From Cliche to Archetype (1970, co-authored with Wilfred Watson), The City as classroom" (1977, co-authored with Katherine Hutcheon and Eric McLuhan).

The views and direction of Marshall McLuhan's research have undergone a major evolution. If at first he is rather a literary critic who criticizes modern Western society for manipulating the consciousness of the masses and the decline of interest in the classical cultural heritage, then in the future the nature of his criticism changes in many ways. Since the 1950s, McLuhan has studied modern society and culture mainly as a product of electrical and electronic communication technologies. It is no coincidence that interest in the work of Marshall McLuhan has increased dramatically with the advent of the Internet of communication theory.

Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) First big work Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Industrial Man's Folklore has become a prominent figure in the field of popular culture studies. ["Our century," wrote Marshall McLuhan, "is the first century in which many thousands of highly trained minds have devoted themselves entirely to the task of professionally penetrating the collective public consciousness ... for the purpose of manipulating, exploiting, and controlling it." ] The title of the book The Mechanical Bride was taken from a play by the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

Like subsequent works, Marshal McLuhan's first book is written in a mosaic style. It consists of small chapters that do not need to be read in order. The fact is that, exploring modern society with its electronic communication technologies, McLuhan follows the way they set up their messages (mosaic is the main form of messages transmitted by means of infocommunication). It is no coincidence that on one page of his books one can find reproductions of advertisements, excerpts from newspaper reports, quotes from scientific works, Shakespeare's works, etc.

“When we deal with information overload, we are left with nothing but perception according to the principles of stable schematism (pattern).” Marshall McLuhan.

In the introduction to the book, McLuhan points out that modern folklore is the product of the intellectual activity of a huge army of professionals: advertising agents, writers, screenwriters, artists, directors, designers, journalists, and scientists. All of them use the state of insufficiency, incompleteness, incompleteness of understanding, which is steadily reproducing in the mass consciousness, for the purpose of mass consumption, which is so necessary for the functioning of the modern capitalist economy. At the same time, the very form of presenting information is of particular importance: in the process of perceiving mosaic messages, the audience does not have time for their consistent rational comprehension. In the book, McLuhan reveals the hidden influence various kinds mass communication: advertising, television, cinema, etc.

Each chapter of the book appears as a relatively independent work, which analyzes one or another aspect of mass culture. One of the chapters, "The Mechanical Bride", became the title of the entire book. In it, McLuhan considers the understanding of the sphere of sexual relations as a derivative of the use of technology. As an example, the pantyhose ad "On a Pedestal" shows a woman's legs in pantyhose standing on a pedestal: "This is a highly behavioral view of sex that reduces the sexual experience to its mechanical and hygienic aspects. ... In the era of thinking machines, it would be truly amazing if they did not come up with machines for making love.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy won a Canadian government award and made McLuhan widely known in the scientific community. In this book, McLuhan answers the question: how communication technologies (mainly writing and printing) affect the organization of cognitive perception and thinking, as well as ways public organization. In many ways, this work continues the research of Harold Innis. McLuhan notes that Innis "became the first person to accidentally discover the process of change immanent in and accompanying the emergence of mass media", but McLuhan goes further than Innis in The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Stages of development of culture and society according to Marshall McLuhan primitive preliterate culture based on a communal way of life; cultures formed under the influence of writing; a special place is given to the role of the phonetic alphabet; a culture that was formed under the influence of I. Gutenberg’s typeset (“Gutenberg Galaxy”), the era of the victory of consistency in perception and thinking, individualism according to the type of Aristotle’s operating cause, the development of which led to the victory of the capitalist mode of production, the industrial revolution, the principle of centralized hierarchical integration in public administration, the nation state; the modern stage is the “electronic society” (the world as a “global village”), under the influence of instantly acting electronic means of communication, bringing the principle of simultaneity, multidimensional audio-tactile space to the leading place in perception and thinking.

"Understanding the means of communication: the continuation of man outside" (1964) McLuhan shows that all objects of human culture (artifacts) act as means of communication (communication and communication) that affect the person and society in themselves. An elementary means of communication is electric light: “Electric light is pure information. It is, so to speak, a means of communication without a message ”(McLuhan, M., Understanding the means of communication: continuation of a person outside). Electric light allows you to use the night while doing activities modern society around the clock. Similarly, television, radio, newspapers and other media have a huge and still largely unknown impact on the development of society by the very fact of their existence. McLuhan formulated the essence of his approach with the famous aphorism “The Medium is the Message” (The Medium is the Message).

The medium is "massage": a list of consequences (1967) When the book went on sale, it seemed to many that a mistake was made in the last word of the title, and that the real title of the book was the aphorism "The medium is the message (The medium is the message)" . However, due to the change of one letter in the word “massage”, at least two new meanings appeared: “a means of communication as a massage”, that is, as something massaging a person, gradually changing his forms of perception, and “a means of communication as an age of the masses” (Mass age). The book was the result of McLuhan's collaboration with designer and photographer Quentin Fiore, who used collage and photographs to frame McLuhan's aphorisms and main ideas.

In Laws of Media, published after the death of Marshall McLuhan (1988) by his son Eric McLuhan, we are talking about understanding the main forms of communication impact.

Influence of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan

We note the many speeches and interviews of Marshall McLuhan, which can be easily found, for example, on YouTube; reprints of his books; the term "McLuenism", which appeared in French to refer to forms of culture that have developed under the influence of electronic means of communication; the inclusion of his name in the prestigious reference almanac "Information Please Almanac" among the most prominent people in the history of mankind.

McLuhan's "piggy bank" can add popularity among artists, sculptors, architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, museum curators, school and university teachers, filmmakers, television producers, manipulation specialists who have become accustomed to the infocommunication society public opinion, newspaper reporters, poets. The well-known representative of aleatoric (that is, created and performed on the basis of chance) music, John Cage, declared his gratitude to McLuhan.

At first, the representatives of the literary establishment, who were fiercely critical of him, over time began to discover more and more that McLuhan, in essence, complements and improves their own ideas about the role of infocommunications. Not only did they begin to call him the author of “the most radical and most developed theory of communication” (Czitron D., Media and the American Mind. From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill, 1982, p. 147), but also publish articles about him as one one of the largest thinkers (see, for example, Thinkers of the Twentieth Century. L., 1984). The ideas of Marshall McLuhan have firmly entered the theoretical arsenal of researchers of the infocommunication society.

IN fiction there are also many followers of McLuhan's ideas (including among representatives of cyberpunk).

The boom of McLuhan's ideas in the West in connection with the global infocommunication revolution should not be surprising, considering how fruitfully he worked in this area. The main ideas of Marshall McLuhan have become self-evident for many today, and it is not difficult for a person who knows his work well to see their many-sided influence in relation to Everyday life, science, culture, philosophy, popular culture, politics, education, advertising, cinema (and not only where it is easiest to see: see, for example, Cronenberg, David, Videodrome and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), where Marshall McLuhan played himself).

Now search engines The Internet, in response to a query about Marshall McLuhan, betrays a lot of scientific studies using it theoretical developments. Through the same Internet, several international projects are carried out, in the center of which are McLuhan's ideas about the formative role of infocommunication tools. The Media Ecology Association (U.S.A.) McLuhan List network has been operating on the Internet for many years, bringing together researchers of the problems of the global infocommunication society from day to day. different countries. In this network, in particular, the son of Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, works fruitfully.

Marshall McLuhan, along with Harold Innis, is sometimes wrongly regarded as the founder of "media theory" in the field of sociology of mass communications. Marshall McLuhan himself not only never considered himself a sociologist, but also distanced himself from sociology as, in principle, an outdated "specialism". Recall that for American sociologists with their structural-functionalist imperative, the electronic youth revolution in America and the events related to it turned out to be unexpected, while for Marshall McLuhan these were things for granted, for example, in connection with the exit to a great life " of the first television generation" of grown-up American boys and girls who absorbed ways of understanding life "with their mother's television viewer".

Under the influence of Marshall McLuhan, the views of Z. Brzezinski were formed.

In philosophy, McLuhan's ideas are often correlated with postmodernism. McLuhan himself showed his fundamental differences with this approach.

In the USSR, the views of Marshall McLuhan have been analyzed since the 1960s in the works of E. Araboglu, V. Averyanov, R. Boretsky, A. Volkov, N. Vasilenko, N. Golyadkin, G. Grigoryan, P. Gurevich, Yu. Davydov , Yu. Kagramanov, E. Kartseva, I. Kravchenko, A. Kovaleva, R. Kopylova, V. Korobeinikov, V. Lyndin, A. Midler, S. Mozhnyagun, V. Skiba, V. Terin, M. Turovskoy, O Feofanov, B. Firsov, V. Tsarev and others.

In 1977-1978 at INION (Institute scientific information in Social Sciences) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, an analytical abstract collection "The Ideological Function of Technocratic Concepts of Propaganda" was published in two volumes, which examined in detail the theoretical views of Marshall McLuhan and, for the most part, an inadequate response to them in Western countries (mainly in the USA). The collection came out with the stamp "For official use", that is, it was aimed mainly at employees of research institutes. If the stamp of the collection has become an anachronism, then its circulation (500 copies) looks quite modern for the Russian Federation.

Starting from this collection, scientific editors whom they knew little English and, as they were supposed to, considered themselves the main authors, the spelling of the name "McLuhan" as "McLuhan" spread (if this spelling is correct, then it is correct to write "luna").

Translations of Marshall McLuhan's works into Russian are very difficult. The unsatisfactory quality of a number of translations largely explains the fact that McLuhan's theoretical developments, despite their importance for understanding modern society, still remain on the periphery of the interests of the Russian scientific community.

Some Sayings About Marshall McLuhan

Writer and publicist Tom Wolfe has suggested that McLuhan is perhaps the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who met with McLuhan, said, "I think he had a brilliant intuition."
Global infocommunication researcher Manuel Castells credited McLuhan as "a great visionary who ... revolutionized the understanding of perception and thought in the field of communications."

Films about Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan's Wake, dir. Kevin McMahon
The ABC by Marshall McLuhan's ABC, dir. David Soubelman
McLuhan Probes dir. David Soubelman
Out of Orbit (Out Of Orbit) dir. Carl Besse

Important for understanding the deep essence of the media are the works of Marshall McLuhan, who conducted a theoretical analysis of the influence of mass communication on social development.
McLuhan's key thesis is the following: the medium is the message (the medium is the message). This means that the content of any message cannot be considered outside the form of its expression and outside the channels of its dissemination. Any event acquires social importance not in itself, but in connection with the messages about it transmitted by means of communication, with accuracy, speed, and breadth of this transmission. The medium of mass communication of our time - electronic technology - is changing and reshaping the forms of social interdependence. Instantaneity (simultaneity) electronic technology enhances participation and involvement not only in media events, but also in pseudo-events generated by media - simulacra.
McLuhan's main ideas are expressed as follows.
Recognition of the huge manipulative potential of the media. The media are capable of “comprehensive violence”, depriving a person of the opportunity to evaluate their own life experience, or rather, to replace personal experience opinion disseminated through the media.
Implosion of communication (explosion inward) is an extremely rapid "explosive compression" of space, time and information, and, consequently, an "explosion" of the individual's deep values.
Cold and hot media. Hot media inflames one feeling to the limit, to a very high definition, i.e. before
full content content. Such media do not allow the fantasy and imagination of communicators and audiences to work. On the contrary, cold media leaves this possibility. According to McLuhan, cold media are technologies of the tribe, live inclusion, participation; hot - technologies of civilization, abstraction, solitude, passivity. The cold media emerging today is retribalizing society; hot - recivilize. Social development is based on their contradiction and alternation. McLuhan also introduces the concept of overheated media. When hot media are overheated, saturated with another system, they mutate into other media.
Media as an amputation. McLuhan sees the media as extensions of the human senses, just as
E. Haeckel considered the tools of activity as an organ projection, i.e. continuation of human organs. Moreover, with the multiple expansion of one of his feelings, the onset of a state of numbness, switching off the feeling, is possible. McLuhan calls this condition autoamputation. This mechanism is explained by the fact that the nervous system protects itself by isolating, amputating an "abnormal" organ, feeling or function. Being separated from the body, the function is closed and reaches a high intensity in itself, but such a complication is again perceived and tolerated by the nervous system only by stupor or already by the next blocking of perception. So self-amputation excludes self-recognition, i.e. destroys the self. Consequently, the media, according to McLuhan, destroyers of the self and personality.
Media extensions of feelings generate non-intersecting systems. If the isolation of our feelings is compensated by the action of consciousness, then their media extensions remain closed systems, incapable of interaction.
main idea M. McLuhan - mass media is the basic determinant of the historical process.
Here, in our opinion, the ideology of M. McLuhan manifested itself. In the same way, the entire historical process can be explained by a change in property relations (as K. Marx did) or progress in metal processing, or military companies, and something else. Nevertheless, this provision can be used as a good and productive research model.

According to McLuhan, in the second half of the 20th century. humanity began to live in a post-literate electronic world, where the macromyth acts as a dynamic semantic structure of people's communication with each other and the world. Languages also belong to a similar structure. Involvement in such languages and myths gives modern forms of mass media the character of collective myth-making. One can even speak of a collective mediagenic hallucination. Consequently, the media is a myth-creating force that conquers the masses, constructing the world of a synthesized sensory-tactile and auditory-visual post-literary culture.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy, M. McLuhan proves that typography consolidated the transition of civilization from the audittactile to the visual type, which led to numerous cultural breaks, in particular, to the “break” of the heart, mind, and emotions. The post-literate electronically mediated civilization of our time is a return to the audio-visual type, which is carried out in a particularly dramatic way for the visual West. The East (including Russia) to a greater extent retained the skills of auditory forms of communication.
means of communication (in broad sense of this word, including books, cinema, means of communication and other forms of communication between people) not only and not so much convey information, certain messages, but they themselves actively influence individual and social consciousness. Acquaintance produced by mediated experience can often lead to a sense of inversion of reality. The real thing or event, when considered, seems to have less concrete significance than how it is presented in the QMS.
The concepts and ideas of M. McLuhan are important because they postulate the power of media influence on all aspects of human existence. At the same time, in our opinion, the revolution, arranged by electronically mediated means of communication (telegraph), has already been completed. On the agenda is the ongoing revolution under the banner of network communications, which differ not in the features of communication channels (the same telegraph, only via satellite), but in the ways of organizing their interaction, i.e. networks.
Understanding the consequences of this revolution is as problematic for our contemporaries as it was problematic for understanding the consequences of printing for Gutenberg's contemporaries.
In connection with the last thesis, M. McLuhan notes: "Buhler speaks of 'a significant number of manuscripts that have survived to this day.
commodities that have been copied from printed books. And further: "In fact, the difference between fifteenth-century manuscripts and incunabula is very small, so the student of the initial period of typography should be aware that the early printers looked at the new invention as just another form of the writing process - artificialiter scribere." "''Horseless carriage'' - good example the same ambiguous position that the printed book was in for some time.

Writer Tom Wolfe once said that he considered McLuhan to be the most outstanding thinker, on a par with Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said: "I think he had the intuition of a genius." McLuhan's aphorisms and sayings, such as "The medium is the message" ("the carrier of information is the message (message) itself" and "Global village" ("global village") have firmly entered the Western mentality and culture. McLuhan predicted the effect of television on society, the essence and nature of advertising, and also forty years ago clearly described the changes in society that we have seen more recently, along with the advent of the Internet.

Marshall McLuhan is one of the most prominent theorists of the 20th century. in the field of culture and communications. He himself was an excellent and resourceful communicator, able to easily build bridges between science and popular culture. The results of his work at the Toronto Center for Culture and Technology brought him scientific fame and made him famous in the 1960s. one of the iconic figures of pop culture. His work on the relationship between culture and communication has had a significant impact on promotional activities; two of his most famous books, The Mechanical Bride and Culture is Our Business, focused on the advertising industry. His work has had and continues to have a significant impact on the course of discussions on the problems of globalization.

Introduction

M. McLuhan gained fame thanks to his two expressions: "global village", which implies a growing trend towards global cultural convergence, and "the carrier of information is a message (message)", taking into account the impact of technology on communications. He sought to disseminate the ideas embedded in them. different ways. His books are often a practical expression of the idea that "the medium is the message"; illustrations, photographs, and unusual presentations are complemented by statements from psychologists, sociologists, and writers such as James Joyce and Thomas Eliot. Critics have argued that his works are not new and that their main themes have already been developed by other authors.

Biography

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 in the city of Edmonton, in the Canadian province of Alberta. After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Manitoba, he received his doctorate from Harvard and in 1936 received his first teaching position at the University of Wisconsin. He then taught at St. Louis University and, after returning to Canada in 1946, at the University of Toronto.

For the first time, the name of M. McLuhan became famous after the publication in 1951 of the book "The Mechanical Bride", dedicated to the American advertising industry. In 1952, M. McLuhan became a professor, and in 1953-1955. led seminars on culture and communication organized by the Ford Foundation. He then became interested in the impact of new technologies on the media; the result of this passion was the appearance in 1962 of the book "The Gutenberg Galaxy" ("Gutenberg Galaxy"). In 1963 M. McLuhan founded the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

International fame brought him the publication of the book Understanding Media (1964) and in the 1960s and 1970s. M. McLuhan began to gain more and more influence as a theorist of the problems of the relationship between culture, media and technology, as well as the author of publications on this topic. More than a dozen books and hundreds of articles by M. McLuhan were devoted to technology ("War and Peace in the Global Village"), art ("Through the Vanishing Point" ("Through the zero mark") ) and advertising (“Culture is Our Business”). He has advised many world leaders, including Jimmy Carter and Pierre Trudeau, and in 1975 was appointed by the Vatican as an adviser to the Commission on Social Communications. M. McLuhan received many prestigious titles and awards, including being a member of the Royal Scientific Society of Canada (1964) and a Companion of the Order of Canada (1970). He died in 1980 while working on several books and preparing to appear on a major international conference in USA.

Best of the day

Main contribution

There are three main themes in the works of M. McLuhan. The first is devoted to the concept of art as a process of cognition related to the symbolic means that are present in various visual appeals - from works of art to advertising. The second theme is related to the use of technology as a way to empower people; its essence lies in the fact that the content of any message is inevitably influenced by the technology used to distribute it. The third theme is determined by the conviction of M. McLuhan that the process human development passed through two eras, primitive and industrial, or "typographic", and entered the third - technological.

The fact that M. McLuhan, in his first work, devoted to the consideration of art as a process of cognition, focused on the problem of advertising, is typical of his approach to the search for relationships between art and pop culture. In The Mechanical Bride, he analyzed several print advertisements, demonstrating the presence of symbolic elements in each of them. His conclusion was that advertising was becoming a kind of folklore; he returns to this theme in "Culture is Our Business" where he describes advertising as "cave art of the twentieth century". However, the attitude of the scientist to advertising was not unambiguously positive:

“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of highly educated individuals have made it their business to penetrate the collective social mind. The purpose of such penetration is to exercise manipulation, exploitation and control. His intention is to create coercion, not the conditions for conscious action. Keeping every person in a helpless state, born of a long mental habit, is the result of both advertising and recreational activities(1951:v)."

The creation of "Understanding Media" marked the beginning of the development by M. McLuhan of his second main theme - the impact of technology on media. The analysis began with these words:

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to fragmenting and separating all things as a means of control, it sometimes seems somewhat shocking to be reminded that in reality the medium itself is the message. Simply put, the personal and social consequences of using any media, i.e., any extension of ourselves, are the result of applying new system calculus, which is introduced into our lives through the development of our personality or any new technology.

Further, M. McLuhan describes the negative and positive effects of the manifestation of this rule. For example, automation replaces human labor; but it also creates new roles for people in relation to their old jobs, replacing the bonds broken by the machine revolution. The same conclusion is drawn with respect to media; humanity, using printing press, made the transition from oral to written culture, but television and radio again returned people to oral culture.

The concept of a circular process, or the return of mankind to its former forms of existence with the help of new technologies, is the essence of the third theme of M. McLuhan's works. “If the technology of I. Gutenberg reproduced the ancient world and threw it to the knees of the Renaissance,” wrote M. McLuhan, “then electrical technologies reproduced the primitive and archaic worlds, past and present, private and corporate, and threw them on the threshold of the West for processing.”

Maybe, best resume McLuhan's main ideas can be found in Laws of Media, published a few years after his death. Initially, he was going to prepare a second edition of Understanding Media, but then his research went beyond the scope of the original book. In this work, M. McLuhan established four fundamental principles and clarified their features for communicators operating in each of the areas, including advertising. These principles were formulated as follows:

1. Each technology enhances the capabilities of a certain organ or a certain ability of the user.

2. When one of the areas of sensation is enhanced or intensified, the other is weakened or suppressed.

3. Each form, brought to the limit of its capabilities, changes its characteristics.

Usually, when formulating these "laws", M. McLuhan insisted that the definition of "law" corresponds to that given by K. Popper: a scientific law is established in such a way as to ensure the possibility of its falsification. M. McLuhan was well aware that the time would come when the perception of laws would change, and his theories would be treated as outdated.

Performance evaluation

S. Neil noted that it is rather difficult to criticize the ideas of M. McLuhan, since his reputation is so high that it has a significant impact on their perception by people. To a certain extent, M. McLuhan was living proof that the media is the message: it is so difficult to separate this person from his ideas. S. Neil himself sharply criticized many of M. McLuhan's theories as scientifically unproven, and possibly unprovable. He claims that "Laws of Media" may be best book M. McLuhan, as it contains evidence of the underlying theories of mental processes.

J. Curtis notes that many of the theories of M. McLuhan were put forward by other authors (Curtis, 1978). There is no doubt that the idea of a global village was expressed by L. Mumford in the framework of his concept of "the only person in the world" (Mumford, 1961). At the same time, the theories of art and meanings of Gyorgy Lukacs and Franco Fortini are very reminiscent of the concepts developed by M. McLuhan. His historical theories bring us back to Henry Bergson's model of history as a process.

Like most modernists, M. McLuhan largely overestimated the direct influence of printed publications and underestimated the spread of the handwritten word in the era that preceded the appearance of J. Gutenberg; as a result, he focused more on technology at the expense of the education needed to use it. In fact, the main obstacle to the assimilation of writing was the lack of education, not technology. His attention to the role of media means that sometimes M. McLuhan ignored the influence of other types of technology; The mobility revolution has contributed just as much to the creation of the global village as the communications revolution. It is interesting to note that M. McLuhan could not foresee the development of the computer revolution, which provided people with the ability to manipulate media both before they receive them and at the time they are received. From the idea of a media tool as a message, we are moving to a paradigm in which the viewer is the means of transmitting information.

As already noted, the idea clearly stated by M. McLuhan about the mutual influence of communications and culture has not lost its significance to this day. His views continue to feed the debate on globalization; such adherents of this direction as T. Levitt owe much to M. McLuhan. Here is how B. Day summed up the influence of the scientist on the advertising industry: “M. McLuhan communicates something that every good advertiser personally perceives, although he rarely approaches anything with this degree of formality. The notion that the media used can have more impact than the message itself is vital for advertisers. B. Day highlights five extremely important points for advertisers in the works of M. McLuhan:

3. Each media tool should be used where its application will be most effective.

4. The audience, to the extent possible, should be involved in the process.

5. The image should always tell the "real" story.

M. McLuhan's views on the meaning of language and symbols are less known, but also extremely important. Influence appeared in the 1990s. technical media, such as the one that engulfed our entire planet satellite television, obviously, but M. McLuhan defined the means of disseminating information as any "self-expansion" and, based on this, included images and words in more ordinary communicative forms. He felt that language is the most powerful metaphor for everything. In one of his last letters to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, M. McLuhan wrote:

“A speaker who speaks any language believes that this language is a media tool or mask, with the help of which he perceives the world in a special way and connects with people ... The words spoken by a lawyer, judge or bureaucrat have a different meaning than the same words spoken by friend or foe... the effects of language as a means of conveying information are quite different from the input or implied meanings of words. All source words have secondary meanings that are usually considered by the speaker or the person carrying out the transmission of the text as irrelevant.

Marshall McLuhan was one of the best-known and most articulate writers on the change in communications, culture, and society in the second half of the 20th century. His observations on the development of new technologies, media and communications have great importance for psychologists and sociologists, as well as business representatives, especially those involved in advertising and marketing. However, at a deeper level, M. McLuhan's remarks about language and symbols have value for all forms of human interaction. The saying that “the media is the message” itself became an element of folklore and remains a symbol of the theoretical and practical achievements of M. McLuhan.

Key life dates:

Studied at the University of Manitoba (bachelor's and master's degrees); received a doctorate from Cambridge;

In 1939 he married Corinna Lewis;

In 1946 he began teaching at the University of Toronto, where he received a professorship in 1952;

In 1953-1955. was the leader of seminars on culture and communications, held by the Ford Foundation;

In 1963 he founded the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto;

In 1977, he played himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall;

The essence of technology from the mastermind
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Extensions of our physical and nervous systems aimed at increasing energy (power) and increasing speed. In essence, if such an increase in energy and speed did not occur, new external extensions of us would either not appear at all, or be discarded.

Important for understanding the deep essence of the media are the works of Marshall McLuhan, who conducted a theoretical analysis of the influence of mass communication on social development.

McLuhan's key thesis is the following: the medium is the message ( the medium is the message). This means that the content of any message cannot be considered outside the form of its expression and outside the channels of its dissemination. Any event acquires social importance not in itself, but in connection with the messages about it transmitted by means of communication, with accuracy, speed, and breadth of this transmission. The medium of mass communication of our time - electronic technology - is changing and reshaping the forms of social interdependence. The immediacy (simultaneity) of electronic technology enhances participation and involvement not only in media events, but also in pseudo-events generated by media - simulacra.

McLuhan's main ideas are expressed as follows.

Recognition of the huge manipulative potential of the media. The media are capable of "comprehensive violence", depriving a person of the opportunity to evaluate their own life experience, or rather, replacing personal experience with an opinion disseminated through the media.

Communication implosion(explosion inward) - an extremely rapid "explosive compression" of space, time and information, and consequently, an "explosion" of the individual's deep values.

Cold and hot media. Hot media inflames one feeling to the limit, to a very high resolution, i.e. until the content is filled in completely. Such media do not allow the fantasy and imagination of communicators and audiences to work. On the contrary, cold media leaves this possibility. According to McLuhan, cold media are technologies of the tribe, live inclusion, participation; hot - technologies of civilization, abstraction, solitude, passivity. The cold media emerging today is retribalizing society; hot - recivilize. Social development is based on their contradiction and alternation. McLuhan also introduces the concept of overheated media. When hot media are overheated, saturated with another system, they mutate into other media.

Media as an amputation. McLuhan considers the media as an extension of human feelings, just as E. Haeckel once considered the tools of activity as an organ projection, i.e. continuation of human organs. Moreover, with the multiple expansion of one of his feelings, the onset of a state of numbness, switching off the feeling, is possible. McLuhan calls this condition autoamputation. This mechanism is explained by the fact that the nervous system protects itself by isolating, amputating an "abnormal" organ, feeling or function. Being separated from the body, the function is closed and reaches a high intensity in itself, but such a complication is again perceived and tolerated by the nervous system only by stupor or already by the next blocking of perception. So self-amputation excludes self-recognition, i.e. destroys the self. Consequently, the media, according to McLuhan, destroyers of the self and personality.

Media extensions of feelings generate non-intersecting systems. If the isolation of our feelings is compensated by the action of consciousness, then their media extensions remain closed systems, incapable of interaction.

The main idea of M. McLuhan - the mass media is the basic determinant of the historical process.

Here, in our opinion, the ideology of M. McLuhan manifested itself. In the same way, the entire historical process can be explained by a change in property relations (as K. Marx did) or progress in metal processing, or military companies, and something else. Nevertheless, this provision can be used as a good and productive research model.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, M. McLuhan argues that typography consolidated the transition of civilization from the auditory to the visual type, which led to numerous cultural breaks, in particular, to the “break” of the heart, mind, and emotions. The post-literate electronically mediated civilization of our time is a return to the audio-visual type, which is carried out in a particularly dramatic way for the visual West. The East (including Russia) to a greater extent retained the skills of auditory forms of communication 1 .

Means of communication (in the broadest sense of the word, including books, cinema, means of communication and other forms of communication between people) not only and not so much transmit information, certain messages, but they themselves actively influence individual and social consciousness. Acquaintance produced by mediated experience can often lead to a sense of inversion of reality. The real thing or event, when considered, seems to have less concrete significance than the way it is presented in the SM K.

The concepts and ideas of M. McLuhan are important because they postulate the power of media influence on all aspects of human existence. At the same time, in our opinion, the revolution, arranged by electronically mediated means of communication (telegraph), has already been completed. On the agenda is the ongoing revolution under the banner of network communications, which differ not in the features of communication channels (the same telegraph, only via satellite), but in the ways of organizing their interaction, i.e. networks.

Understanding the consequences of this revolution is as problematic for our contemporaries as it was problematic for understanding the consequences of printing for Gutenberg's contemporaries.

In connection with the last thesis, M. McLuhan notes: "Buhler speaks of 'a significant number of manuscripts that have survived to this day, which were copied from printed books'." And further: "In fact, the difference between fifteenth-century manuscripts and incunabula is very small, so the student of the initial period of printing should be aware that the early printers looked at the new invention as just another form of the writing process - artificialiter scribere" . "The Horseless Carriage" is a good example of the same ambiguous position that the printed book was in for some time.

Ideolatry (according to the Russian philosopher N.F. Fedorov) is the worship of an idea, the property of scientists to absolutize the ideas they themselves created. Ideolatry is similar to idolatry (idolatry. See: Fedorov N.F. Philosophy of the common cause. In 2 vols. M .: Publishing house ACT, 2003.
Buhler C. The Fifteenth Century Book. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960, p. 16.
McLuhan M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Creation of Man of Print Culture. K .: Nika-Center, 2003 (Series "Paradigm Shift"; Issue 1). S. 228.

McLuhan (there are entire sites dedicated only to him - www.marshallmcluhan.com www.mcluhanstudies.com) once told his friend and colleague that in order to save at least one shred of civilizations of the past (Judeo-Greek-Roman-Renaissance-Enlightenment), all televisions must be destroyed. This phrase reflects the conflict in which a new type of media sweeps away the foundations of civilizations of the past, since they were verbally oriented, and they were replaced by visual mechanisms, which became the medium of television. The Toronto School, of which McLuhan is among the founders, in fact, tried to put the emphasis is not so much on the content of the media, as other sciences do, including journalism or literary criticism, but on the material carrier-transmitter through which this content is transmitted. And this allowed us to take a fundamentally different look at communication. Moreover, this school can be interpreted as being built not on the dominance of content, but on the dominance of the form of transmission. McLuhan wrote texts and gave interviews in a style that corresponded to the era of television, which he himself spoke about (see books: McLuhan M. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Creation of a man of printed culture. - Kyiv, 2004; McLuen G.M. Understanding media. External extensions of a person. - M., 2003; McLuhan M. Understanding media. - Cambridge - London, 1994; McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003). He believed that the world began to live within the framework of a mosaic culture, an example of which is television news, the only unifying moment of which is that they happened on the same day and hour. These are certain self-closed pieces that should have formed into a single mosaic. In an interview with Playboy magazine (what other academic professors can you say that about?), McLuhan emphasized that effective media study deals not only with the content of the media, but also with the media themselves, with the cultural contexts in which the media functions ( Essential McLuhan. Ed. by E. McLuhan, F. Zingrone. - New York, 1995, r. 236). Here he also emphasizes his basic idea that new technologies are extensions of our body, our sense organs. Before the advent of writing, man lived in an acoustic space, his culture was oral. The main medium was speech, and no one knew more than others, because there was no individualization and specialization. Oral culture does everything at the same time. He describes acoustic space as having no center or boundaries. Then the transition to visual forms begins - writing and printing. McLuhan's phrase that " western man was a Gutenberg man”, means: the press gives rise to everything that has shaped the world today: nationalism, the reformation and the industrial revolution. And here the media and the news flow that they generate play a special role. He interprets the book form as a private voice, but the press becomes a reflection of the collective opinion: “The book is a private confessional form that represents a “point of view”. The press, in turn, is a group confessional form that ensures the involvement of the community. ”Print brought to life a new phenomenon that did not exist either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003, p. 83). People turned to self-expression, to distinguishing themselves from others. As printing continues, photocopying occurs. If in the case of printing the audience is not included in the publication process, now the opposite is true. By the way, the Soviet "samizdat" is part of the same phenomenon. Close media are beginning to support each other. The advent of television, for example, has led to a doubling of the circulation of news magazines. And McLuhan sees the following explanation for this phenomenon: “News magazines, exceptionally tessellated in form, offer not a window on the world like the pictorials of the past, but present corporate images of the community in action. If the viewer of the illustrated magazine is passive, then the reader of the news magazine is actively involved in the process of producing the meanings of creating a collective image. Therefore, the television habit of being involved in the creation of a mosaic image greatly increased the attractiveness of such news magazines, while at the same time reducing interest in more traditional illustrative publications. a person is more homogenized, certain emotions are suppressed in him in order to achieve practicality and effectiveness. In an interview with Playboy, he emphasized that the alphabet neutralized all the diversity of primitive cultures, translating their complexities into simple visual forms. Another well-known distinction of McLuhan on cold and hot media. By his definition, the hot remedy excludes and the cold includes. The hot tool is completely filled with information, so it does not require the participation of the audience. It is a photograph - as opposed to a caricature, which is a cold medium. In a cold medium, the audience has to be active. Cold media provides less certainty, which forces readers/viewers to be more active. Building on his maxim that the medium (and not the content) is the message, McLuhan emphasizes that the content plays a subordinate role. Mussolini, Hitler and Roosevelt rise to the top in the age of radio, like Kennedy in the age of television. From this, by the way, it is clear that Khrushchev was more of a TV-era man than Brezhnev, who reads from a piece of paper. In the book Understanding Media, McLuhan gives the following definition of a hot remedy: “A hot remedy is a remedy that expands a single feeling to a degree" high definition"" ( McLuen G.M. Understanding media. External extensions of a person. - M., 2003, p. 27). And further: “Hot means are characterized, therefore, by a low degree of audience participation, and cold ones are characterized by a high degree her participation." Accordingly, backward countries are cold, developed countries are hot. Speech or telephone are cold means of communication. Movies and radio are hot. Clearly, McLuhan is saying all this from his basic understanding that media is an extension of the human senses. Going in this conditionally physiological way, McLuhan does not need the content of what is being transmitted, he is interested in the general functioning. It is McLuhan who is given the palm by Marshall Poe in separating content from media ( Poe M.T. A history of communications. - Cambridge, 2011). This made it possible to take a completely different look at this area. McLuhan says in an interview with the BBC that he began writing the book "Guttenberg Galaxy" when he read a study on the impact of the printed word on Africans ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003). By the way, the idea of the influence of the press on the formation of nationalism and nation-states, which Benedict Anderson later wrote about, also belongs to McLuhan. And this stems from his notion that the news flow reflects collective perceptions, while the book reflects the individual point of view. is read with great difficulty, as if it was intended to be looked at, not read. The fixation of the visual factor had a very serious consequences. McLuhan writes: "The homogenization of people and materials will be the essence of the program of the Gutenberg era, as well as the source of wealth and strength unknown to any other era and technology" ( McLuhan M. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Creation of a man of printed culture. - Kyiv, 2004, p. 191). That is, visual mechanisms made us more similar. And this, of course, makes it easier to manage. We have little idea how it all functioned in the past. For example, the Middle Ages did not know authorship in today's sense, there was no concept of a reading public. The handwritten book was slow to read and slow to process. The printed book became the first unified and reproducible mass commodity, creating a precedent, a model for such a commodity for the future. He sees the role of the printed word in that it was it that created Western civilization, including the Reformation ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003, p. 60). These are features such as individualism, private opinion or one's own view. Other cultural forms (radio or manuscript) do not support these characteristics. By the way, he believed that writing introduced linearity, which would subsequently affect the consistent organization of a person's entire life. At the same time, linearity is not inherent in radio, film and television ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003, p. 36). And they again broke the old habits that came with the printed world. In his opinion, the Greeks of the times of oral culture had a bad attitude towards applied knowledge ( McLuhan M. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Creation of a man of printed culture. - Kyiv, 2004, p. 35). He connects this with the fact that applied knowledge is unthinkable without uniformity and homogenization of the population. He sees linear writing as a visualization of non-visual functions and relationships. Papyrus allowed Rome to take full advantage of alphabetic writing ( McLuen G.M. Understanding media. External extensions of a person. - M., 2003, p. 162). This leap in speed and coverage of space made it possible, in his opinion, to create the Roman Empire. Television, as a cold tool, rejects the formed types (politics, doctors, lawyers), since in this case the audience has nothing to supplement them with. A cold medium requires the work of a viewer. By the way, McLuhan gives the following explanation why we are interested in films about gangsters and police officers ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003, p. 78). Both those and others are hunters by nature, and this is our distant past of the Paleolithic times. The same goes for James Bond films. Vietnam was the first American television war. Previous wars were fought with the help of hot media (movies, paintings, photographs, press) ( McLuhan M. Understanding me. Lectures and interviews. - Cambridge, 2003, p. 156). The people were too involved in this war and they rejected it. As you can see, this is another interpretation of the fact that television did not win the war. Writer Chesterton introduces McLuhan to Catholicism. Accordingly, there are works that consider the influence of Catholicism on its media theory. One interesting thought is stated here: if the media is the message, then the user becomes the content. And McLuhan's theory of communication reflects not transportation, but transformation. Catholicism makes it possible to make a transformation. In general, it should be recognized that akluen opens up a fundamentally new direction. And he not only opens it, he moves it forward to the maximum, becoming the hero of the world of news, magazines and television, that is, putting into practice those laws that he himself introduces and discusses. In the fifties he taught seminars on communication and culture at the University of Toronto, which were funded by the Ford Foundation. And this, too, was probably one of the impetuses for the dissemination of his ideas.

The city as a classroom McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan

Biography

Main works

Influence of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan

Some Sayings About Marshall McLuhan

Films about Marshall McLuhan

Notes

Literature

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In Russian

Bibliography

In English

In Russian

Introduction

Biography

Best of the day

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Performance evaluation

Key life dates: