It’s been Marshall McLuhan week at TVOntario. Veteran hustler Bill Marshall, meanwhile, is planning an annual McLuhan event. And though most of the McLuhan oeuvre is out of print, you can still find his books in libraries. So how does McLuhanism stand up?

Well, filmmaker Kevin McMahon, in McLuhan’s Wake, depicts a favourite McLuhan story, by Edgar Allan Poe, about a sailor sucked into a whirlpool who uses his helplessness as an opportunity to study the currents and find a way out. That would be McLuhan man in the media maelstrom. The image is lovely but, in the spirit of a wake, let me pick a small fight with one of the mariner’s conclusions.

Marshall McLuhan, like others before him, understood the impact of the invention of print: It isolated individuals in their own consciousness, cut them off from direct conversation with each other, broke down communities, created national languages and nationalism, plus specialization, compartmentalization etc. He insisted that a comparable transformation was being effected by the “new electric technology” — radio, movies, especially TV — which “threatens the ancient technology of literacy” and favoured “the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word.” He saw TV as a “cool” medium that elicited involvement rather than detachment, and swiftly “extended” the human senses over the entire planet. The result would be a historic reversal, a post-literate tribalism, the global village.

Of course, it must be tempting, at least unconsciously, for writers to feel they are witnessing a revolution, or a seismic shift between eras, that they can describe and also build a career on. It’s not nearly as dramatic to focus on similarities between, say, the experience of books and that of TV or the Net. What Marshall McLuhan missed, I’d argue, was just those continuities. Like what?

Well, TV is still text-based and scripted, though it’s not a book. Furthermore, the communication is entirely one way, just like reading. Even on the Internet, interactive means one side speaks, then the other; not the simultaneous encounter of live beings responding in the same moment to everything, including gesture and breath — as actors do to a live audience, even when it’s silent — and as happens in every conversation.

Reading McLuhan now, you’d think the kind of individualist ideologies of the past twenty years — Reagan, Thatcher, Bush — could never have happened. Instead, there should have been eternally youthful people acting tribally and dancing the twist. But the collective nature of experience in oral or preliterate societies was not based on a technology, whether focused on the ear, the eye or all the senses together; it was based on the direct connectedness of living people. Anything “mediated” by media, that is by communications technologies, whether print or electronic, will always lead to the fragmented quality of print culture. We still live, despite TV or the Internet, in the age of print.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the old master by saying this. I appreciate the chance to revisit his work and argue with it. It’s my contribution to McLuhan week.

Friedman’s America: It’s interesting when someone irritates you severely, but it’s not clear why and you must work to explain it. That’s how I feel about New York Times super-pundit Thomas L. Friedman. It isn’t his views, which probably put him on the humane left of U.S. journalism. It’s, well — last week, for instance, he wrote a column pretending to be a letter from George W. Bush to “leaders of the Muslim world.” He listed a bunch of random items he’d read in the press — an imam said this, the father of a suicide bomber said that — and demanded that the “leaders” deal with these or “we are headed toward a civilizational war.” As if you couldn’t compile a similarly offensive list from the U.S., or any nation, or anyone you know. Then he generalizes to the entire Muslim world (“it has to do with the rise within your midst of a deeply intolerant strain”) and prescribes the cure (“the decent but passive Muslim centre must go to war against this”). As if the Earth is spread out before him, the Voice of America, for his judgment and instruction. In a column on Iraq, he asked: “Is there just one Iraqi scientist or official who wants to see the freedom of his country? . . . If there is not one such person . . . that tells us something about the Iraqi people.” It’s not the violence or self-servingness that makes you nuts in the end. It’s the sanctimonious moral posturing that, come to think of it, perfectly mirrors that of Osama bin Laden. Poor, misguided John Manley. He told the National Post this week that Canadians have a problem with “parading our moral superiority.”

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.