Marshall McLuhan NYT obit with bibliography

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New York Times obituary of Marshall McLuhan, with bibliography

1 January 1981

Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'

by Alden Whitman

Marshall McLuhan, the communications theorist who taught that ''the medium
is the message,'' died yesterday in his sleep at his Toronto home, his
family reported. He was 69 years old. ''Most people are alive in an earlier
time, but you must be alive in o

ur own time,'' Mr. McLuhan once said. Born in what he considered an age of
information, Mr. McLuhan strove to understand and explain the electronic
media, which he believed were shaping people in ways they hardly suspected.

Meaning of Oft-Quoted Maxim

He had a penchant for aphorisms - as well as a weakness for puns - and he
summed up his views on the effects of media in the maxim ''the medium is the
message.'' By this he meant that the way we acquire information affects us
more than the information itself.

Mr. McLuhan believed that television, for example, has a profound impact on
children not because of what is on it, but because of what is in it. Its
mosaic pattern of dots of light, its lack of detail, its motion and sound,
and the fact that the light comes at the viewer - all these things make
television-watching an aural and tactile experience as well as a visual one,
he said, and far more deeply involving for a child than reading a book.

As for television's content, he told Fordham University students in October
1967: ''The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness
of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on
film.''

Mr. McLuhan contended that print, by involving only the visual sense, and by
presenting information in small bits, one by one, gave man the power to
separate thought from feeling and led to the fragmentation of knowledge. It
enabled Western man to specialize and to mechanize, but it also led, he
said, to ''alienation from their other senses.''

He believed that electronic media, by showing what was happening on the
other side of the world, were creating a global electronic village in which
books would become obsolete.

To describe the effects of different media, Mr. McLuhan used the terms
''hot'' and ''cool.'' A hot medium was one that ''allows of less
participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation
than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.''

Some Examples Offered

Telephones are cool, he said, as are television and comic books. Books are
hot. A phonograph is hot, a tape recorder cool. Radio and films are
relatively hot among the electric media. Magazines are hot, but not as hot
as books. And there are variations within a single medium. A dictionary, on
Mr. McLuhan's scale, is very hot compared with a mystery story.

Richard M. Nixon did not go over well on television during the 1960
Presidential campaign, Mr. McLuhan argued, because he was a ''hot'' person
in a cool medium. John F. Kennedy was more effective because he was
''cool.''

Despite his own choice of a hot medium - books - in which to express
himself, Mr. McLuhan won a wide audience and was considered by some as an
oracle of the electronic age. Others accused him of being a confused and
confusing phrasemonger or an outright charlatan.

Although the lanky, professorial-looking theorist was revered as a prophet
and teacher in advertising circles, he did not think highly of the
advertising business. ''The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn't
condition a mouse,'' he said.

Ads 'Are Always Good News'

On the other hand he seemed to have had a good opinion of the
advertisements. ''The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or
newspaper,'' he said. ''Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they
are always good news.''

Although sometimes criticized as an arrogant apostle of electronic media,
Mr. McLuhan said he was simply trying to help people control the new media
by understanding their effects.

''By knowing how technology shapes our environment,'' he once told an
interviewer, ''we can transcend its absolutely determining power. Far from
regarding technological change as inevitable, I insist that if we understand
its components we can turn it off any time we choose. Short of turning it
off, there are lots of moderate controls conceivable.''

Mr. McLuhan often said he did not fully comprehend his own work. ''I don't
pretend to understand it,'' he remarked. ''After all, my stuff is very
difficult.''

Nonetheless, his two major books -''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' and
''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'' - created a cult of
McLuhanism that he did little to discourage.

Abstractions and Insights

Mr. McLuhan was a quiet man who rarely went to the movies or watched
television. He was more fond of reading and talking, especially talking. His
monologues and lectures tended to be an amalgam of abstractions, flashing
insights and abstruse assertions. ''The criminal, like the artist, is a
social explorer,'' he said in one of his lectures.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born July 21, 1911, in Edmonton, Alberta. His
father, Herbert, was a real estate and insurance salesman, and his mother,
Elsie, an actress and monologuist.

After the family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Marshall, then 10 years old,
began to tinker with radios and thought of becoming an engineer, his goal
when he entered the University of Manitoba. But, he said, ''I read my way
out of engineering and into English literature,'' and he took a bachelor of
arts degree in 1933 and a master's the following year.

He went to Britain to study literature at Cambridge University, receiving a
B.A. in 1936 and a doctorate in 1942 for a dissertation entitled ''The Place
of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time.''

No Understanding of Students

Meanwhile, Mr. McLuhan had his first brush with mass culture in 1936 when he
tried to teach Elizabethan rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin. ''I was
confronted with young Americans I was incapable of understanding,'' he said.
''I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture in order to get
through.''

At about that time he joined the Roman Catholic Church and for some years
preferred to teach at parochial institutions. He said later that his books
were merely ''probes,'' that he did not believe in his work as he believed
in Catholicism.

>From 1937 to 1944 he taught at St. Louis University. Returning to Canada, he
taught at Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario, for two years, moving
then to St. Michael's College, the Catholic division of the University of
Toronto. He was named a full professor in 1952, a year after he published
''The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Men.''

The book was his first published attempt to explore the effects of mass
culture on those engulfed in it. He then expressed distaste for ''the
pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press,
radio, movies and advertising.''

Focus on Culture in General

Undismayed by lack of recognition, Mr. McLuhan continued to shift his focus
from literature to culture in general. With part of a Ford Foundation grant
in the mid-1950's, he founded a periodical called Explorations, in which
communications was discussed.

Mr. McLuhan finally won wide recognition in 1962 for ''The Gutenberg
Galaxy,'' which won him the Governor General's Award for critical prose,
Canada's highest literary prize.

The book discussed the effects on Western European culture of the invention
of movable type in the 15th century. Mr. McLuhan proposed that the resulting
dominance of print accounted for linear development in musical and serial
thinking, in mathematics and the sciences.

As print superseded oral communication, he argued, the eye superseded the
ear as the primary sensory organ. This process, he said, led to
self-centeredness in man and fragmentation in society. Thought and action
were separated because the act of reading slowed down reaction to what was
read. It was a pause in what Mr. McLuhan called the ''tribalism'' of man.

Separating Thought and Action

But with the 20th-century electronic age, he said, man returned to certain
of his tribal ways because the world had become ''a global village.'' This
opinion was elaborated upon in the 1964 book ''Understanding Media,'' which
contended that electronic media, especially television, had redistributed
and heightened sensory awareness to such a degree that previous separation
of thought and action was significantly reduced. Electronic circuitry, he
also said, made human behavior less isolated and more conformist.

McLuhan books are not easy reading, for the author shunned sequential
argument. Trying to define his thinking more clearly, Mr. McLuhan, with
Quentin Fiore, produced ''The Medium Is the Massage'' in 1967. It was a
collection of aphorisms illustrating how life was being transformed by
media. The title reflected Mr. McLuhan's opinion ''that a medium is not
something neutral - it does something to people.''

''It takes hold of them,'' he continued. ''It massages them, it bumps them
around.'' While he was concentrating on communications, Mr. McLuhan
continued to teach literature at Toronto. In 1963 he was appointed director
of the university's Center for Culture and Technology, which does research
on sensory perception as related to communications.

Humanities Chair at Fordham

In 1966 he was named to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham
University in the Bronx. The job was to pay $100,000, financed by New York
State, but the State Attorney General ruled that New York could not put up
the money because of the constitutional ban on state aid to parochial
schools. The university appropriated the money for the visitor's salary.

Mr. McLuhan gave his first Fordham lecture in September 1967 to 200 students
who had enrolled in his course. His first discourse was termed ''a good
show'' by the editor of the campus newspaper. One student was described as
being in a mild state of shock. ''The poor kid,'' a fellow student said.
''He tried to take notes on it like it was a normal lecture.''

Meanwhile, with various collaborators, Mr. McLuhan produced books on his
philosophy almost every year. His pace seemed unaffected by surgery in 1967
to remove a benign brain tumor.

In ''War and Peace in the Global Village,'' published in 1968, he presented
a collection of epigrams and pictures posing the argument that war is an
involuntary quest for identity that follows every new technological age.

Mr. McLuhan made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's 1977 film ''Annie
Hall.'' The character played by Mr. Allen was standing in line at a movie
having an argument about Mr. McLuhan's philosophy when Mr. McLuhan suddenly
appeared, settled the dispute and exited. Mr. Allen then turned to the
camera to ask why real life was not like that.

Some of His Other Works

His other books included ''Counterblast,'' ''From Cliche to Archetype,''
''Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,'' and ''Culture Is Our Business.''

''The book is a very special form of communication,'' he told a 1969
convention of the American Booksellers Association. ''It is unique and it
will persist.''

Mr. McLuhan suffered a stroke in September 1979 and was forced to retire
from teaching at the end of the school year. In 1939 Mr. McLuhan married
Corinne Keller, a Texan who was a drama student at the Pasadena Playhouse in
California. They had six children: Eric, Mary, Theresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth
and Michael.

The McLuhans' Toronto home was a three-story house with a narrow front and a
small lawn. Mr. McLuhan loved to read while reclining on the living room
couch with 20 books from which he chose his evening fare.

In New York he rented a house in Bronxville that was also quickly overrun
with books.

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