The CBC is running a heritage moment (or whatever they call that 60 second slice of cheese) on Marshal McLuhan and his epiphany in coming up with “the medium is the message” We briefly touched on him in an organizational behaviour class I took in university and I seem to recall some controversy about him then (mid 80s). I also recall thinking that he took a few nifty sounding sentences and beat them to death. What’s the dope on him today? Is he regarded as an influential thinker who foresaw the information age or an academic who got lucky with a few sound bites?
His idea about the world developing into a global village through new communication methods was spot on, the rest is gibberish as far as I can tell.
I think this one is gonna need an airing out in GD, rather than have a nice, neat specific answer.
So, moved from GQ to Great Debates.
samclem GQ moderator
I think Cecil did an article on this subject a few years ago. I’ll see if I can dig it up later (time permitting…getting ready to go on another of my long trips).
-XT
In this day and age, one could argue that a body of work consisting of clever sound bites is prescient.
Here is what Cecil has to say about it if you are interested.
“99 percent of what he wrote was horse manure, the remaining 1 percent was dead on”…in todays day and age that makes him…practically a politician. 
-XT
When I was frosh he reviewed some of my papers (my T.A. was one of his students).
It’s gratifying to know I wasn’t whooshed by his stuff. I got it and just wasn’t impressed. Maybe I’m right about Jackson Pollock too.
I’m fascinated the Great Master would say this:
Gosh, I doubt it very much. It’s plainly and objectively false. The great majority of human economic activity, even in the rich countries, is dedicated to making, changing, and/or transporting physical things.
It’s a popular meme on the Internet to blather about how we trade in information and not physical products in today’s world. It’s also wrong.
I was really into McLuhan when I was an undergrad. I agree with the “honkie bullshitter” line in general, but there are a few reasons McLuhan is cool:
(1) He may be the only person in history to read all of Finnegan’s Wake and understand it.
(2) He had one of the best cameos in movie history, in the movie Annie Hall.
(3) His ideas inspired William Gibson’s work.
In addition to being cool, though, McLuhan shouldn’t just be dismissed. His 4 Laws of Media are useful for speculating on the effects of new media, for example.
Well certainly when you buy a car, you get a physical object. But did you really get sold a car, or simply a load of marketting hogwash?
I have no numbers, but I wouldn’t be suprised if the advertising and customer research divisions of automobile companies have a larger budget than the hard-core techological R&D divisions.
Well, arguably, the “things” in a post-industrial nation are in fact complex machines whose assembly and use required the rapid exchange of information (consider all the planning required to design a car and the training necessary to operate it). There are relatively few “things” we have that were just dug up and put into instant use. It isn’t like the grow the grain, haul the grain, sell the grain, eat the grain economies of agricultural societies.
Granted, we have a lot of grain-eating, and basic foodstuffs haven’t really changed in hundreds (if not thousands) of years, but McCluhan was apparently thinking about the changes and increasing complexities we’d get from the movement of technology and information.
Of course, that could be a gross misunderstanding, hardly unusual when McCluhan is involved.
I got sold a car, dude. It’s sitting in my driveway; it weighs four thousand freakin’ pounds. It probably cost about twelve thousand dollars for Hyundai to construct it.
How could I drive “marketing hogwash” to work? How could I put by baseball equipment into the back of marketing hogwash? No, I am fairly certain that I am paying for a physical device.
R&D is information, isn’t it? Or did you mean production, instead of R&D?
The biggest expense in running an automobile factory - by far - is the cost of actually physically constructing the car, both labor and materials. Automobile manufacturing, incidentally, is by far the single largest industry in the first world.
Cite?
I’d have guessed agriculture.
According to this reliable source, insurance is the biggest industry, followed by information, and then auto sales (not the same as manufacturing). This would seem to give some support to McLuhan’s prophecy, even if he didn’t fortell the growth of the insurance industry.
If you sort by annual payroll, health care is the biggest industry. That was my WAG as to biggest industry, and I sort by payroll just to make me be right. 
This is just for the US, of course, but I’m a little suspicious that if we got a working definition of “first world” and were able to compile all the data it would turn out auto manufacturing is the biggest industry… given that it’s pretty far behind in the US, nonexistent in Canada, and the less prominent roll of auto manufacturing in European economies.
Incidentally, googling has a lot of references to “travel” as the biggest industy in the world, while US newspapers talk about the growth of the “service” industry, whatever that is. Presumably both of those compile several industries as one – hospitality, food service, retail sales, etc., and sorting by whatever data is convenient.
Ack. What I mean to say is that if we did get all that data, I highly doubt auto mfg would be close to #1, but reading it now it sounds like I mean the opposite.
Well, as soon as one hears the word “information,” one should wonder “information about WHAT?” Information in and of itself is meaningless. Now, if it’s information about Inventory or Sales or Input Costs, then we’ve got something to talk about.
But for those things to exist, SOMEBODY, somewhere, has to be manufacturing physical, tangible goods for sale.
Surely you jest. The auto industry is enormous in Canada; Ontario alone produces more cars than any U.S. state. Canadian 2003 production of vehicles was $66 billion, producing about two and a half million vehicles.
OEM and after market parts production produced another $50 billion in sales.
That’s, umm, a long way from nonexistent.
Cite?