Marshall McLuhan 1965 - The Future of Man in the Electric Age

This video was produced by the British Broad Corp in 1965. The interviewer is Frank Kermode (British literary critic).
More information:
One of the most charismatic, controversial and original thinkers of our time whose remarkable perception propelled him onto the international stage, Marshall McLuhan is universally regarded as the father of communications and media studies and prophet of the information age
Biography
McLuhan was still a twenty-year old undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, in western Canada, in the dirty thirties, when he wrote in his diary that he would never become an academic. He was learning in spite of his professors, but he would become a professor of English in spite of himself. After Manitoba, graduate work at Cambridge University planted the seed for McLuhan’s eventual move toward media analysis. Looking back on both his own Cambridge years and the longer history of the institution, he reflected that a principal aim of the faculty could be summarized as the training of perception, a phrase that aptly summarizes his own aim throughout his career.
Portrait of Marshall McLuhan by Yousuf Karsh. Copyright the Estate of Yousuf Karsh, California.
Portrait by Yousuf Karsh. Copyright the Estate of Yousuf Karsh, California.
The shock that McLuhan experienced in his first teaching post propelled him toward media analysis. Though his students at the University of Wisconsin were his juniors by only five to eight years, he felt removed from them by a generation. He suspected that this had to do with ways of learning and set out to investigate it. The investigation led him back to lessons on the training of perception from his Cambridge professors, such as I.A. Richards (The Meaning of Meaning, Practical Criticism), and forward to discoveries from James Joyce, the symbolist poets, Ezra Pound; back to antiquity and the myth of Narcissus, forward to the mythic structure of modern Western culture dominated by electric technology.
Understanding Media, first published in 1964, focuses on the media effects that permeate society and culture, but McLuhan’s starting point is always the individual, because he defines media as technological extensions of the body. As a result, McLuhan often puts his inquiry and his conclusions in terms of the ratio between the physical senses (the extent to which we depend on them relative to each other) and the consequences of modifications to that ratio. This invariably entails a psychological dimension. Thus, the invention of the alphabet and the resulting intensification of the visual sense in the communication process gave sight priority over hearing, but the effect was so powerful that it went beyond communication through language to reshape literate society’s conception and use of space.
Understanding Media brought McLuhan to prominence in the same decade that celebrated flower power. San Francisco, the home of the summer of love, hosted the first McLuhan festival, featuring the man himself. The saying “God is dead” was much in vogue in the counterculture that quickly adopted McLuhan but missed the irony of giving a man of deep faith the status of an icon.
Spectacular sales of Understanding Media, in hardback and then in paperback editions, and the San Francisco symposium brought him a steady stream of invitations for speaking engagements. He addressed countless groups, ranging from the American Marketing Association and the Container Corporation of America to AT&T and IBM. In March 1967, NBC aired “This is Marshall McLuhan” in its Experiment in TV series. He played on his own famous saying, publishing The Medium is the Massage (co-produced with Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel), even as he was signing contracts for Culture Is Our Business and From Cliché to Archetype (with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson) with publishers in New York. Dozens of universities awarded McLuhan honorary degrees and he secured a Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University.
- By Terrence Gordon (July 2002)
Important links:
McLuhan Galaxy: mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com
McLuhan on Maui: www.mcluhanonmaui.com
McLuhan Estate: marshallmcluhan.com
Blog: mcluhan.net
Audio/Video: www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/

[@detouredbriefly9426]

marshall is still way ahead of us now

[@aek12]

It is because he judges everything from the truth/ natural side of things. From the perspective of first man of the world. But we are occupied with just technology, without knowing anything about our senses and instrument of knowledge that is the consciousness. Reality is very complex and we don't know what are we doing.

[@greatmcluhansghost7134]

@@aek12 I don[t think he judges...he merely observes

[@Cindybabe99]

@aek12 what an absolutely beautiful comment :) thanks for sharing your thoughts

[@donaldwhittaker7987]

Outstanding. I've owned and read nearly all of his work. Understanding Media is a must read for students.

[@SuperAleaiactaest]

I love how you can see their faces in the TVs behind them. it ads such a meta-layer to their discussion

[@MarkSeibold]

For those that are not aware here, there are many other interviews and lectures by Marshall McLuhan that you might want to access some of those other interviews and lectures that were made over 20 years across the planet, in many locations, including here in America later on famous popular TV interview shows. I believe I began listening to him when I was only 11 years old because neighbors gave me an antique shortwave radio. I accidentally tuned into the BBC one night in 1965 at about the start of my sixth grade elementary class year. The younger generations today would have no idea how to live without the internet, the cellphone, the portable m3p players, [not even Sony Walkmans we're invented yet in 1965. Or no personal computers. The technology in average American home then it was a television set and an AM radio that sat on the kitchen counter, the telephone it was plugged into the wall of the kitchen or dining room.] This interview probably pulled me away from television immediately, after hearing this interview although I was possibly a little too young to understand it. I was already building Crystal radios since age 10 in 1964. I soon bought my first serious astronomy telescope with my own earned berry picking money in late 1967. This further confirmed for me a total loss of any interest in television. Who would have known that I went on for the past 20 years as a background extra actor on Hollywood movie sets in my mid life. But still today I do not watch television. I've been on live acting movie sets longer now than I have attended theaters to watch movies, or thousands of hours longer than ever, avoiding television since my early teen age. I've spoken about this many times on National Public Radio on their talk of the Nation program, as I held the record for calling into it between 2005 and 2013, the last 7 years that it was broadcast from live from Washington DC daily. The thousands of conversations and interviews on their Talk of the Nation program with famous people can all be accessed as they are archived at the NPR site.] Their discussions varied greatly, and although I did not participate on any discussion about the subject of Marshall McLuhan, it was mostly about my art and astronomy science that contributed to their related discussions. Or also see just a 9 minute excerpt from the Tom Snyder tomorrow show in 1976, as he interviews Marshall McLuhan. > kzbin.info/www/bejne/fIjUgKepbtSkbpI

[@BigWoollyMammoth]

I understood maybe half of this and my mind is whirling with the weight of it. Must watch again and go further down the MM rabbit hole. Thanks for the nudge this way TM.

[@ThekidManson]

Terence McKenna has an interesting talk on him and his ideas called Riding Range with Marshall McLuhan

[@failuretocommunicate]

That rarest of pleasures, a truly advanced human.

[@DataWaveTaGo]

"Electric information comes from all directions at once and when your information comes from all directions simultaneously you're living in an acoustic world. The acoustic world has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections and no stasis; everything is changing. Our ancestors lived in a mythic world because they had none of the means of literate classification. A myth is a speeded up following of a process. We live mythically ourselves so that we understand their myths for the first time. You should know the stakes are; the stakes are our civilization versus tribalism and it's a considerable revolution to have been through twenty-five hundred years of phonetic literacy, only to encounter the end of that road." - Marshall McLuhan “And this is the old myth of Narcissus. The word Narcissus means narcosis, numbness and drugged; and Narcissus was drugged into thinking that that image outside himself was somebody else. Narcissus did not fall in love with his own image, he thought it was somebody else. And the same with us, in our technology and gadgetry and gimmickry and so on, we don’t think that is merely a part of our own physical organism extended out there, we’re like Narcissus, completely numb. Now when we put out a new part of ourselves, extend a new part of ourselves by technology into the environment we protect ourselves by numbing that area. The more I looked at this the more I had difficulty explaining why people ignored it.” M. McLuhan The effects of technology McLuhan reported on have been confirmed by numerous experiments in recent (and some not so recent) years. View investigative films such as "The Secret You" - explorations into consciousness - with prof. Marcus Du Sautoy, "Out of Control?" - explorations into unconsciousness - (The "?" is part of the title, though I have not seen it on You Tube, but I have obtained it from a BBC contact) and even "Automatic Brain - The Magic Of The Unconscious Mind". McLuhan's last book "Laws of Media: The New Science" by Eric McLuhan and Marshall McLuhan is still available.

[@jwetzel3141]

The invention of print created the very idea of a public. Woah.

[@somethingaboutthemovies5116]

Thanks so much for this McLuhan rendezvous.

[@IllPropaganda]

3:39 Oh how the internet has proven Professor McLuhan to be spot-on in his descriptions of speed of light media!

[@cullenaustin6882]

I guess Im asking randomly but does any of you know of a method to log back into an instagram account? I stupidly forgot the login password. I appreciate any tips you can give me

[@kiangus3491]

@Cullen Austin instablaster :)

[@cullenaustin6882]

@Kian Gus I really appreciate your reply. I found the site on google and Im waiting for the hacking stuff now. Seems to take quite some time so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

[@cullenaustin6882]

@Kian Gus HOLY **** IT ACTUALLY WORKED :O I just hacked my IG password within about 45 mins by using the site. Just had to pay 15 bucks but for sure worth the money :) Thank you so much you really help me out!

[@kiangus3491]

@Cullen Austin Glad I could help :D

[@misternewoutlook5437]

Everything I see of Marshall McLuhan on youtube is bewilderingly applicable to the 2020s. He paved the way for futurist commentators like Alvin Toffler, who frequently mentions McLuhan's ideas in Future Shock. But McLuhan remains historically succinct and more relevant somehow than Toffler and the rest from that period.

[@megavide0]

1:07 "... we can see the world as an image, instantaneously, but... we have chosen - under the pressure of technology - to set it out successively, like a block of print ..."

[@FloridaRaider]

Brilliant, brilliant man

[@megavide0]

6:10 "... circuitry... enormous increase of the amounts of information moving... a need for pattern recognition... a need that the old poets foresaw..." 7:25 " ... everything under electric conditions is _looped_ -- folded over into yourself... your image of yourself changes completely..." 7:47 "... The Medium is the Message..." --- ".. the environment... gets very little recognition as a form..." 9:17 "... #television..." TV as an iconic medium ::: 10:35 "The iconic is very low in visual quality... very high in tactile quality... #cartoon..." 12:23 [cartoons are COOL! :)]

[@js-miep2025]

what a beautiful summary...thanks!

[@mirzaghalib8659]

this is something both great & new to me after, only minutes ago, hearing his name on this website.... I am very much engaged here with a real desire to learn more about who he is/was and his serious ideas.... thanks

[@surfinmuso37]

Wow-the linear nature of print secured our present linear nature of thought.

[@greatmcluhansghost7134]

really? the written language made us more linear and coincides with: sedentary lifestyle, agriculture, the flourish of judeo christianity(and later a state sanctioned organized religion adopted by the Holy Roman Empire), patriarchal societal structures, private property, last names, consumerism and later capitalism via currency-based economies(with grain storage + supply and demand, etc.), the end of nomadic cultures in the western world, and perhaps most significantly turning our backs on nature with the rise of big cities, etc. This linearity you and he speak of is akin to lineage and contrary to pagan cultures which held feminine goddesses in esteem and reverence.

[@deryasonmez330]

@@greatmcluhansghost7134 thanks ghostie.

[@deskryptic]

the question of electronic totalitarianism is real. look at Cambridge analytica. they understand this stuff (partially).

[@AnhTuPhucDerrickHoangCanada]

This guy is enlightening and I'm amusing, both been, bye here to see you

[@patrickmccormack4318]

This video seems to be summary of McLuhan, years before his ideas matured and vetted.

[@uriludger6392]

That last bit. The need to become totally aware of all the consequences of everything we are doing, before it even happens...I think that is what humanity is trying to achieve with AI?

[@InnrHavn]

that last sencetence.. WOAAAAAAAA o-:

[@lewisdrummerboy36]

oLofy_son I know! I had to write it down. so luminous.

[@chensel75]

@@lewisdrummerboy36 lol I also wrote it down. I suspect it'll have a place in the article about McLuhan that I'm writing now.

[@Belrivers]

I luv communicating my thoughts with ai. Ai doesn't get defensive or threatened.

[@jondartist06]

who else is here because of the JRs nurse from the sopranos

[@bravonorthyt]

The medium is the message.

[@chandlerstinson4165]

I was looking for Marshall Erikson from how i met your mother😂

[@chensel75]

Highly recommend you stick with McLuhan instead lol

[@danielajorgelinaperez1257]

hola podrian subtitularlo o subirlo traducido para quienes no sabemos ingles....gracias

[@jayturner3397]

Man was a visionary..

[@Devo6500]

MM describing the term 'cool'. 🤣

[@estellerussell352]

Alpha,Bravo,Charlie,Delta.....

[@Gafa996Gaddisa]

allan watts brings me

[@asiguere]

Im watching this in a sub zero medium

[@johnwasserman9925]

shout out if youre here for Fowles

[@okidoke4822]

That cigarette smoke

[@antquinonez]

Frank is moving too fast for me to think that he gets these radical ideas.

[@lathaachu8935]

From kavin memes time 😂

[@muliefriend4785]

This is why only the Church had readers.

[@GideonJudges-ql7bu]

Exactly. The printing press caused the Reformation...the beginning of the end, imo.

[@antquinonez]

God, I need a smoke.

[@victorselmo1777]

7:31

[@brodyeckblad7413]

Forgive me for suggesting he’s tripped

[@jamiemcmillan6742]

Thug life

[@virtual_cosmonaut]

im just like h1m frfr

[@estellerussell352]

Virtual Reality (VR)

[@estellerussell352]

Structuralism

[@SwampGas703]

"electronic totalitarianism"... yup.

[@estellerussell352]

Artificial Intelligence

[@antquinonez]

frank isn’t quite getting it. Sad.

[@lukepatrick6622]

Does anyone agree that his ideologies are somewhat prejudice?

[@aek12]

Search, for yuri bezmenov on youtube, if you are not aware, how accurate he is.

[@AxxinTheSupernova]

They are very prejudiced

[@lukehauser1182]

McLuhan as a talking head... hmmm.. sorta misses the point, eh?

[@hegemonycricket2182]

No. If you are utilizing the toolkit he established for media study, you should be able to appreciate what he is saying, while understanding that this medium has different effects than other media. The fact that he appears on TV to discuss his ideas is a product of the time in which he lived, and to us now should seem very wonderful and interesting. Read his books, involve yourself with his TV appearances, learn from his lectures on KZbin...learning about media through various media...beautiful thing.

[@Vissepisse11]

Misses the point? Could you please be a bit more specific? As for the talking heads look no further than CNN, And there you have it.

[@sillygoose4472]

6:12