Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! [Paperback]

Marshall McLuhan, somewhere, is getting quite a chuckle out of Douglas Coupland's biography of the prophet of the digital age, if only because Coupland's imaginative recounting has refashioned the typographical media of the book (a keystone subject of McLuhan's work) to reflect the impact of the digital media on its aging ancester.

The result is a format that is far more engaging and immensely more informative than the voluminous biographies that dominate the genre today. The biography, more than anything else, clearly demonstrates what McLuhan meant when he wrote: "The medium is the message," in Understanding Media, his study of electronic media as it swallowed print. In that study, McLuhan pointed out that media would be forced to adapt to emerging media, or face annihilation. As an example, he pointed to two print products launched during the golden age of TV, a time when the p.m. newspaper was being wiped off the face of the planet by the disruptive electronic media. Life magazine and MAD magazine thrived because their formats reflected the influence of television's picture oriented format. Life's photos, and MAD's woodcut-like illustrations benefited from complementing the new media's format.

And, so it is with Coupland's biography of McLuhan, who prophesized the Internet 50 years ago, give or take.

The book's format of short chapters, similar to blocks of type on the Internet, direct writing typified by short declarative sentences, conversational style, with sections and chapters broken up by pages lifted from the www network, and quotes from McLuhan, demonstrate how books will change as a result of the Internet's dominance.

It's for better or worse, depending upon the eye of the beholder.

Coupland, like McLuhan, recognizes the fact of how the new media is changing the means of expression that preceded it. Nothing personal. Just how it is.

And so it was for McLuhan, who largely detested the electronic media, even as he described its fundamental effects on the sensory landscape in crystal clarity. McLuhan was most comfortable and preferred old school media. As in auditory, before even the written word became coin of the realm. But the curmudgeonly prophet was never foolish enough to suggest attempting to turn back the expansion of new media. Nor did McLuhan offer "answers." For those with open minds, he shed light on developments that still puzzle, scare, and dismay those who don't "get it."

My initial reaction to Coupland's format was: this is cute. But Coupland's book aptly introduces us to McLuhan the man, who comes alive in this hybrid. The eccentric and mad punster with two arteries feeding his weirdly wired brain, while the vast majority of us mortals have one becomes a real being, beyond authoring pithy rules to live by in the digital age. But other factors in shaping McLuhan's pioneering observation also are recognized, ranging from his gene pool to his environment, and other influences such as the Canadian author/philosopher who introduced McLuhan to the notions that the media are extension of our senses.

No. This is not a cute book. It is a fine, informative, and highly entertaining description of a giant's life, in a spare 209 pages. I have often wondered while slogging through ponderous biographies whether a concise biography could describe the subject as well. Coupland answers in the affirmative.

That's not to say I don't want to know more about McLuhan, or that I didn't just pull Understanding Media off the shelf while writing this review to double check a few things. I will continue to consult McLuhan's thinking as long as my mind works and I can get vertical in the a.m.

For those new to McLuhan, it's hard to imagine a better introduction. But even for those who have been touched by McLuhan's observations and thoughts, this is a wonderfully entertaining and informative read.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy...

I just got done reading this book. Only then it was called simply "Marshall McLuhan", and appeared in a series called "Extraordinary Canadians" Extraordinary Canadians Marshall Mcluhan. It was a bio that said more about Doug Coupland than about MM, which is to say, only DC could write it. Also only DC could re-cast, -version, -vive, and re-release it, or perhaps it was his publisher, editor, agent, or manager who got the brilliant idea to rename the book after McLuhan's line in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (in which the late MM played himself).

After all, that's probably what most people know MM from. Or perhaps the unforgettable phrase, "The medium is the message". If anyone remembers any books, they are likely the photoessays by Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, "The Medium is the Massage" The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects and "War and Peace in the Global Village" War and Peace in the Global Village, which are long on photos and short on essays, and which MM had almost nothing to do with. They are sort of "greatest hits" collections of witty aphorisms, epithets, jokes, puns, and one-liners. In this MM excelled (witness the titles). Doug Coupland says that's the way his brain was wired. There was also "The Book of Probes" The Book of Probes from David Carson, author of "The End of Print". Instead of a pocket paperback with pithy cut lines over black and white photos, it was a giant hardback of pithy cut lines over Carson's color graphics and calligraphy.

McLuhan's first essay was on Chesterton, (reprinted in The Medium and the Light The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion), and GKC also excelled at very short verbal thrust and parry--from a line to a paragraph. Some dogged critics have mastered the entire books of The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media, but for everyone else, it doesn't click. There is no understanding Marshall McLuhan, because he didn't want to be understood. But read a random line now from one of the aforementioned sources, or the quotes and quips scattered throughout this book, and MM seems positively prescient.

Reviewers of Coupland's bio suggest that unlike everyone else, he "gets" it: he understands MM. But he got it long ago. Gen X and the rest of his books flow from a psyche soaked in MM. One idea MM got from art is about the figure and ground (what the rest of us call background). He said ignore the figure; watch the ground. That's where the change is happening. In Doug's "Shampoo Planet" Shampoo Planet there is something like a periodic chart of Gen X (or something like that) that forms the ground for the book. The figures are somewhat cursory sketches, but groundswells run through the book, v. much as in "The Catcher in the Rye", and Planet is written in the same sort of reminiscent stream-of-consciousness style. The example I think of is a cartoon. Different artists do Fred Flintstone and the stone-age background. The studio hopes that viewers stay riveted on Fred's antics, and don't notice that he keeps running past the same tree. Chuck Jones made good use of incongruent, clashing backgrounds in the 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon, "Duck Amuck".

I think of the line in a Dylan song: "You know something's happening here but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" Marshall didn't know what was happening either, simply that something was, and set out to explore it. He started with the inherited academic vocabulary: media were extensions of man. What? There was something called manuscript culture before the printing press, and it changed things. Then the printing press, which people noticed, also did, in some indefinable way. Then radio. But by the time you got to TV, things were changing with electric speed. "By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. Today man's nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment." Hmmmm. What's that sound like?

That said, this book did help me "get" McLuhan. Doug basically says that MM was one of a kind, and shows why he could introduce the rest of us fish to the water. Doug oft refers to the essay by Tom Wolfe, "What If He is Right?" from 1965, and which was reprinted in McLuhan: Hot and Cool (1967 McLuhan Hot and Cool: A Primer for the Understanding of McLuhan, a book I found very decent and enlightening, and which also enabled me to say I know something of his work.

Douglas Coupland mixes insight about the present as seen from the past, insight about the past as seen from the present and has almost nothing to say about the future. He thinks his guess is a good as yours or mine. Who among us is smart enough and secure enough to say that?
The stuff about Marshall MacLuhan's neurology, his cultural, familial, geographic and historical background is the type of insight biographers struggle to achieve at many times the length of this precise book.
The idea that MacLuhan has been forgotten and dismissed because his work was about thinking - not the monetization and cubby-holing of thought - is Coupland's key analysis, though every page offers food for thought.
"You Know Nothing of My Work" is an inviting entryway to the imaginativeness that doomed the 60s and the thoughts of one of the Western World's greatest minds to forever stay in the 60s, while the rest of us re-invent the wheel and marvel at its shape and utility.