No Doubt He's Media's Modern Messenger

THE MEDIUM

AND THE MESSENGER

“If it works, it’s obsolete.”  Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) made that pretty profound observation (along with many others) over the course of his career.

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Happy birthday. The man credited with promulgating the idea that “the medium is the message” … who anticipated the “global village” … and, 3 decades before it came to pass, explained human behavior in the interconnected internet age -- would have been 100 today.

Other McLuhan-isms to ponder:

• Tomorrow is our permanent address.
• The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.
• We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
• Invention is the mother of necessities.
• Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?
• Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.
• The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
• The future of the book is the blurb.
• The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
• Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.
• Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.

McLuhan in a nutshell: His seminal book, Understanding Media (1964), is where he laid out his concept that “The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

Proof of the pudding: In 1967, with Quentin Fiore, McLuhan intended to expand on his insights with a book titled with his now-famous phrase, when the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had a typographical error on the cover which read The Medium is the Massage, as it still does.

Dr. Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s eldest son has explained, “When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’” and he adds: “Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: ‘Message’ and ‘Mess Age,’ ‘Massage’ and ‘Mass Age.’”

A happy birthday McLuhan-ism we all can use: “I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

No doubt about it.

Geoff Steck
Chief Catalyst
Alexander Publishing & Marketing

8 Depot Square
Englewood, NJ 07631
201-569-5373
tgimguy@gmail.com   

P.S.  Further reading: http://markbattypublisher.com/books/everymans-mcluhan/