Look up marshall in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Marshall may refer to:

• "Marshall", a British/Commonwealth spelling for the military rank of marshal
• Marshall (name)
• Marshall Aerospace, an aerospace contractor based in Cambridge, England
• Marshall Amplification, a brand of guitar amplifier
• Marshall Bus, an English bus manufacturer
• Marshall Cavendish, a subsidiary of Times Publishing Group, publisher of books, directories, magazines and partworks
• Marshalling (computer science), transforming data from an in-memory representation to objects, such as with XML transformation
• Aircraft marshalling, the visual signalling between ground personnel and pilots.
• Marshall Plan (also known as "European Recovery Program"), United States plan (named for Secretary of State George Marshall) for rebuilding the allied countries of Europe and repelling communism after World War II
  • Marshall Scholarship, awarded to graduating American undergraduates by the British government, in commemoration of the Marshall Plan
• Marshall Pottery, the largest producer of red-clay pottery in the United States
• Marshall School of Business, the business school at the University of Southern California
• Marshall, Sons & Co. of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, manufacturers of steam traction engines and the Field Marshall range of tractors
• Marshall University, a university in Huntington, West Virginia
  • Marshall Thundering Herd, this school's intercollegiate athletic program
  • We Are Marshall, a 2006 movie about the aftermath of the 1970 plane crash that killed most of the Marshall University football team and coaching staff
• USS Marshall (DD-676), a United States Navy destroyer in commission from 1943 to 1969
• USS Hunter Marshall (DE-602), a United States Navy destroyer escort converted during construction into the high-speed transport USS Hunter Marshall (APD-112)
• USS Hunter Marshall (APD-112), a United States Navy high-speed transport in commission from 1945 to 1946

Place names[link]

• Marshall Islands (also known as "Republic of the Marshall Islands"), an island nation in the Pacific Ocean

In the United States of America:

• Marshall, Alaska
• Marshall, Arkansas
• Marshall, California
• Marshall, former name of Lotus, California
• Marshall Pass, a mountain pass in Colorado
• Marshall, Illinois
• Marshall, Indiana
• Marshall, Michigan
• Marshall, Minnesota
• Marshall, Missouri
• Marshall, Oklahoma
• Marshall, New York
• Marshall, North Carolina
• Marshall, North Dakota
• Marshall, Texas
• Marshall, Virginia
• Marshall, Wisconsin
  • Marshall, Dane County, Wisconsin
  • Marshall, Richland County, Wisconsin
  • Marshall, Rusk County, Wisconsin

In other countries:

• Marshall, Victoria, a suburb of Geelong, Victoria, Australia
• Marshall, Saskatchewan

See also[link]

• All pages beginning with "Marshall"
• All pages with titles containing "Marshall"
• Marshal (disambiguation)
• Marshalls (disambiguation)
• Marshalling (disambiguation)
• Marshall College (disambiguation)
• Marshall County (disambiguation)
• Marshall Township (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Kerry King
King performing in 2007
Background information
Born	(1964-06-03) June 3, 1964 (age 48) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genres	Thrash metal, speed metal
Occupations	Musician, songwriter
Instruments	Guitar, vocals
Years active	1981–present
Labels	American Recordings, Metal Blade
Associated acts	Slayer, Megadeth, Witchery, Sum 41
Notable instruments
B.C. Rich KKV

Kerry King (born June 3, 1964^[1]) is an American musician, best known as the lead and rhythm guitarist for the American thrash metal band, Slayer. He co-founded the band with Jeff Hanneman in 1981 and has been a member ever since. He has made guest appearances with acts including the Beastie Boys, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Ice-T, Witchery, Sum 41, Megadeth and Metallica. He is known for playing B.C. Rich guitars with Marshall amplifiers.

Biography[link]

King was born in Los Angeles, California. His father was an aircraft parts inspector, and his mother was an employee of a telephone company. When he was a teenager, Kerry started learning guitar at Calvano's music in South Gate Ca. Russ Dismuke was his teacher. Kerry began his career in a Pat Boone cover band. Kerry moved to Phoenix, Arizona as an adult. He divorced once; his current wife is Ayesha King.^[2] In 1981 King was trying out for the position as a guitarist in a band. After the session was over Jeff Hanneman approached him and the two began playing Iron Maiden and Judas Priest songs with the session drummer. Hanneman mentioned "Why don’t we start our OWN band?” [Laughs] I was like, “… Fuck yeah!"^[3] King's trademark appearance, was praised to such a degree by Blender magazine, who included a tour of his body ink.^[4] King's acronym, KFK, was revealed to mean "Kerry Fuckin' King" in the January 2007 Issue of Guitar World.^[5] King currently resides in Corona, California.^[5]

Guest appearances[link]

In addition to appearing on Slayer's albums, he has also made several guest appearances as lead guitarist. While lending production to 1986’s Reign in Blood, Rick Rubin was also helming production of the Beastie Boys debut album Licensed to Ill. Rubin felt the track "No Sleep till Brooklyn" needed a guitar solo, so he offered King several hundred dollars to lay down the part.^[6] King has since commented that his playing ability "certainly wasn’t that of a virtuoso".^[6] "No Sleep till Brooklyn", whose title was a spoof on Motörhead’s 1981 live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, was originally intended to feature King being knocked offstage by a gorilla in its music video though King refused.^[6] King replied, "If there’s gonna be anyone knocking anyone offstage, it’ll be me knocking the gorilla", which is what subsequently happened.^[6] King has reminisced that he thought the Beastie Boys were cool, although never having heard any of their music at the time.^[6] On Licensed to Ill, King also played the guitar solo on the song "Fight For Your Right (To Party)".^[7]

King at Tuska-Festival

King contributed a lead guitar outro part to Pantera’s song "Goddamn Electric", which appeared on the 2000 album Reinventing the Steel.^[8] King’s rig was set up in Pantera’s bathroom backstage just after Ozzfest in Dallas, as the group still didn't have their own dressing room on top of not appearing on the festival bill.^[8] After King had finished the first take, Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell ran in and yelled "DON’T LET HIM DO IT AGAIN!"^[8] King tried again with the hope he would find a superior rendition, though the first take was used.^[8] King has also made several guest appearances in Marilyn Manson's "Rape Of The World" tour, joining the band to play classic tracks such as "Little Horn", "1996" and "Irresponsible Hate Anthem". Many fans noticed elements of King's own style used on these occasions.^[9] On October 21, 2010, the finale date of the Jägermeister Music Tour, King joined Megadeth on stage, at the Gibson Amphitheater in Hollywood, California to perform "Rattlehead" which was the first time in 26 years that King has shared the stage with Megadeth and Inan with his band.^[10]

Feuds[link]

King has had well-publicized disagreements with several of his contemporaries, including a long-standing feud with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, who attempted to persuade King to leave the "poseurs," "lame spikes," and "eyeliner" of Slayer behind and focus on Megadeth. In GuitarWorld.com's Dear Guitar Hero, King noted that he "admires him to this day" as a guitarist, though he considered Mustaine a "hypocrite."^[11] In 2009 Slayer and Megadeth co-headlined a small, four show Canadian tour.^[12] In January 2010, Dave Mustaine and Kerry King were in a T.G.I. Friday's in Temecula, California, getting to know each other again.^[13] The feud between King and Mustaine was suggested by a Blabbermouth.net interview to have been dropped after a chance meeting at an airport, as King noted that he "just couldn't remember" what the feud was about anymore.^[14]

There was a feud between King and Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn, who claims that King started "talking shit about us out of nowhere."^[15] King labeled Machine Head as “sell-outs” after the release of their 2001 album Supercharger. King continued to criticize the band stating "They're responsible for rap-metal," "they fooled me into thinking they're metal," "'they have no integrity left."^[15] Flynn has since noted that King has "finally squashed the beef."^[16] When King proposed a tour between the "Big Four" thrash metal bands, King suggested that Machine Head be included instead of Anthrax.^[17] King stated in an interview that Machine Head's The Blackening is "kick-ass."^[18]

In 2006, Slayer's producer Rick Rubin lent production to Metallica's then-untitled Death Magnetic album, instead of Slayer for their album Christ Illusion. King deemed this action a "slap in the fucking face,"^[19] labeling Metallica as a "sinking ship."^[20] During an interview on drummers, King said that Soulfly drummer Joe Nunez did not join Slayer because "his mother wouldn't let him," that Adrian Erlandsson "hits his drums like a fag," and that Raymond Herrera "has no hands".^[21] In 2011 Adrian Erlandsson responded by posting a photo on his Lockerz account of a bent bass drum beater along with the caption, "Up yours, Mr. King, soft hitters don't bend bass drum beaters!"^[22]

Style and influence[link]

Kerry King's first experience with a guitar was when he was a child.^[23] Early albums, such as Hell Awaits and Reign in Blood, featured a "wailing style" and "demented soloing often mimicking the screams of the song's victims."^[24] Steve Huey of Allmusic described his and Jeff Hannemans guitar solos as "wildly chaotic,"^[25] and Thom Jurek, also of Allmusic, described his work on 2006's Christ Illusion as "create an intensely harrowing and angular riff that changes from verse to verse, through the refrain and bridge, and comes back again."^[26]

Equipment[link]

Discography[link]

References[link]

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan ca. 1967
Born	Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-07-21)July 21, 1911 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Died	December 31, 1980(1980-12-31) (aged 69) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
School	Media theory, Toronto School of communication theory
Main interests	Media, mass media, sensorium, New Criticism
Notable ideas	The medium is the message, Global village, Figure and ground media, Tetrad of media effects, Hot and cool media
Influenced by Giambattista Vico, Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, Thomas Nashe, G. K. Chesterton, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Moses Hadas
Influenced Walter J. Ong, Abbie Hoffman, Neil Postman, Timothy Leary, Camille Paglia, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, B.W. Powe, Jean Baudrillard

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.^[1][2]

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.^[3] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence started to wane in the early seventies.^[4] In the years after his death, he would continue to be a controversial figure in academic circles.^[5] With the arrival of the internet, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.^[6][7][8]

Life and career[link]

McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Elsie Naomi (née Hall) and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. "Marshall" was a family name: his maternal grandmother's surname. Both of his parents were born in Canada. His mother was a Baptist schoolteacher who later became an actress. His father was a Methodist and had a real estate business in Edmonton. When war broke out, the business failed, and McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian army. After a year of service he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928.^[9]

At Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty,^[10][11] later referring to this stage as agnosticism.^[12] McLuhan earned a BA (1933)—winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences^[13][14]—and MA (1934) in English from the University of Manitoba, after a one year stint as an engineering major. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, McLuhan was accepted for enrollment at the University of Cambridge. Although he already had earned BA and MA degrees at Manitoba, Cambridge required him to enroll as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's credit toward a three-year Cambridge Bachelor's degree, before any doctoral studies.^[15] He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge in the Fall of 1934, where he studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and was influenced by New Criticism.^[16] Upon reflection years after, he credited the faculty there with influencing the direction of his later work because of their emphasis on the training of perception and such concepts as Richards' notion of feedforward.^[17] These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms.^[18] He received his bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936^[19] and began graduate work. Later, he returned from England to take a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which he held for the 1936–37 academic year, unable to find a suitable job in Canada.^[20]

While studying the trivium at Cambridge he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1937,^[21] founded on his reading of G. K. Chesterton.^[22] In 1935 he wrote to his mother: "[H]ad I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained agnostic for many years at least".^[23] At the end of March 1937,^[24] McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process when he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church. After consulting with a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert; his mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable.^[25] McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter.^[26] He had a lifelong interest in the number three^[27]—the trivium, the Trinity—and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him.^[28] For the rest of his career he taught in Roman Catholic institutions of higher education. From 1937 to 1944 he taught English at Saint Louis University (with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he returned to Cambridge). At Saint Louis he tutored and befriended Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912–2003), who would go on to write his Ph.D. dissertation on a topic McLuhan had called to his attention, and who would himself also later become a well-known authority on communication and technology.

While in St. Louis, he also met his future wife. On August 4, 1939, McLuhan married teacher and aspiring actress Corinne Lewis (1912–2008)^[29] of Fort Worth, Texas, and they spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940^[19]) and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. War had broken out in Europe while the McLuhans were in England, and he obtained permission to complete and submit his dissertation from the United States, without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defense. In 1940 the McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University, where he continued teaching and they started a family. He was awarded a Ph.D. in December 1943.^[30] Returning to Canada, from 1944 to 1946 McLuhan taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. Moving to Toronto in 1946, McLuhan joined the faculty of St. Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Hugh Kenner was one of his students and Canadian economist and communications scholar Harold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on McLuhan's work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."^[31]

In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars, funded by the Ford Foundation, at the University of Toronto. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963.^[18] He published his first major work during this period: The Mechanical Bride (1951) was an examination of the effect of advertising on society and culture. He also produced an important journal, Explorations, with Edmund Carpenter, throughout the 1950s.^[32] Together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye, McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory. McLuhan remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology.

McLuhan was named to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, for one year (1967–68).^[33] While at Fordham, McLuhan was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor; it was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto, where, for the rest of his life, he taught at the University of Toronto and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour. In 1970, McLuhan was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.^[34] In 1975 the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair.

Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove McLuhan to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, IBM and AT&T among them.^[18] In September 1979 he suffered a stroke, which affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research center shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests, most notably by Woody Allen. Allen's Oscar-winning motion picture Annie Hall had McLuhan in a cameo as himself: a pompous academic arguing with Allen in a cinema queue is silenced by McLuhan suddenly appearing and saying, "You know nothing of my work." This was one of McLuhan's most frequently expressed statements to and about those who would disagree with him.^[35]

He never fully recovered from the stroke, and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980.^{[citation needed]}

Major works[link]

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric—collectively known as the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe.^[36] In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and language. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis.^[37]

In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous aphorism "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media.^[38]

McLuhan also started the journal Explorations with anthropologist Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In a letter to Walter Ong dated May 31, 1953, McLuhan reported that he had received a two-year grant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal.^{[citation needed]}

Tom Wolfe suggests that a hidden influence on McLuhan's work is the Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the "noosphere". Wolfe theorizes that McLuhan may have thought that association of his ideas with those of a Catholic theologian, albeit one suppressed by Rome, might have denied him the intellectual audience he wanted to reach and so omitted all reference of de Chardin from his published work, while privately acknowledging his influence.^[39]

[edit] The Mechanical Bride (1951)

McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp.

Like his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride is unique and composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order—what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.

Examples of advertisements[link]

• A nose for news and a stomach for whiskey: McLuhan analyzes an ad for Time Magazine in which he likens a reporter depicted as a romantic character from a Hemingway novel and asks "Why is it [his] plangent duty to achieve cirrhosis of the liver?"^[40]
• Freedom to Listen—Freedom to Look: An ad for the Radio Corporation of America depicts a rural family doing their business with the radio on. Earlier in the Bride McLuhan notes "We still have our freedom to listen?" and here "Come on kiddies. Buy a radio and feel free—to listen."^[41]
• For Men of Distinction—Lord Calvert: An ad for Lord Calvert whiskey depicts nine gentlemen holding a glass of their whiskey, while McLuhan notes the lack of non-artists amongst them; "Why pick on the arts? Hasn't anyone in science or industry ever distinguished himself by drinking whiskey?"^[42]
• The Famous DuBarry Success Course: An ad for beauty creams complete with female model in a swimsuit hawks itself as a "success course" complete with "tuition", to which McLuhan asks, "Why laugh and grow fat when you can experience anguish and success in a strait jacket?"^[43]

[edit] The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.

Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.^[44]

Movable type[link]

His episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.^[45]

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."^[46]

The global village[link]

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.^[47]

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan himself was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.^[48]

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.^[49]

The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book". If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies".^[50]

Though the World Wide Web was invented almost thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy, and ten years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:

The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind (Marshall McLuhan 1962).^{[citation needed]}

Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution.^[3]

McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America.^[51] However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."^[52] McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."^{[citation needed]}

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.^[53]

[edit] Understanding Media (1964)

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world “we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.”^[54]

McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."^[55] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical.^[56] He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"Hot" and "cool" media[link]

In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, were "hot"—that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.^[57]

"Any hot medium 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."^[58]

Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture and photography.

Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached."^[59]

This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.^[18]

[edit] Criticism of Understanding Media

Some theorists have attacked McLuhan’s definition and treatment of the word “medium” for being too simplistic. Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan’s medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.^[60]

In Media Manifestos, Regis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan’s envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he too is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:

The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary “public” for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious “mana”; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on. ^[61]

Furthermore, when Wired interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan “more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst . . . . McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology.”^[62]

Dwight McDonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his “aphoristic” style of prose, which he believes left Understanding Media filled with “contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness.” ^[63]

Additionally, Brian Winston’s Misunderstanding Media, published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his technologically deterministic stances.^[64] Raymond Williams and James W. Carey further this point of contention, claiming:

The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory […] It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism […] If the medium - whether print or television – is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects. (Williams 1990, 126/7)^[65]

David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem," whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan’s ignorance toward sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.^[66]

While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan’s frustrating writing style and absolute mode of argument (it tends to be declaratory and “elliptical”^[67] rather than linear), McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as “probes” or “mosaics” offering a toolkit approaches to thinking about the media.

Despite this appeal, “most of the literary essays about McLuhan’s work were sarcastic and contemptuous”^[68] and painted his admirers as “cult members or disciples of a new feel-good religion.”^[69]

[edit] Defences of Understanding Media

With the passage of time, critical defences of this key piece of literature emerged as McLuhan’s thinking found more purchase in a changing social environment. The contemporary resonance of some of the key concepts he presented in Understanding Media is demonstrated in the way his vision of the “electric”,^[70] global age is linked to understandings of globalization.^[71]

Arguing that Understanding Media should be seen as a canonic “anti-text” in media and communications,^[72] Joshua Meyrowitz believes that many of McLuhan’s early critics had misinterpreted his work.^[73] McLuhan’s eclectic writing style is redeemed with praise for its postmodern sensibilities^[74] and suitability for virtual spaces.^[75] James Morrison for example, argued that it resembles a kind of “hypertext” that “stress connections among multifaceted phenomena”.^[76]

Critical theorists have also taken up the challenges presented by McLuhan’s work by addressing its argued weaknesses. Noting the lack of attention McLuhan’s theories generally paid to questions of power, class and capitalism, Donna Flayhan for example has entertained the possibility of reconsidering medium theory through a Marxist lens.^[77]

[edit] The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

This book, published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller,^[7] "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide."^[78] Initiated by Quentin Fiore,^[79] McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.^[80]

Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.

Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.^[81]

An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."^[82]

"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking

"Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."—'Middle aged man' speaking

[edit] War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

McLuhan used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.

Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man:^[83]

• Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
• Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
• Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
• Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
• Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
• Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.
• Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
• Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio

. Wedding of sight and sound.

• Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
• Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

[edit] From Cliché to Archetype (1970)

In his 1970 book, From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan, collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson,^[84] approached the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater.

In McLuhan's terms, a cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects.

An example of this given by McLuhan is Eugene Ionesco's play The Bald Soprano, whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an Assimil language book. "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible."< ref>From Cliché to Archetype, p. 4.</ref>

McLuhan's archetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context Carl Jung described.

McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the cliché and the archetype, or a "doubleness":

Another theme of the Wake [Finnegans Wake] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.^[85]

McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd:

Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.^[86]

The "languages of the heart", or what McLuhan would otherwise define as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.

The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed."^[87] All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater. It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.

Key concepts[link]

Tetrad[link]

In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

• What does the medium enhance?
• What does the medium make obsolete?
• What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
• What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.^[18]

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.^[88]

Using the example of radio:

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

Figure and ground[link]

McLuhan adapted the Gestalt psychology idea of a figure and a ground, which underpins the meaning of "The medium is the message." He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium or figure, necessarily operates through its context, or ground.

McLuhan believed that to fully grasp the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals.^[18]

All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions about time and space. The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used—and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates—are analyzed together. He believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society.^[18]

Legacy[link]

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity had much to do with the work of two California advertising executives, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal profits to fund their practice of "genius scouting." Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both Time and Newsweek, any time he needed it.

In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival", McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, and editors from the San Francisco Chronicle and Ramparts magazine. Perhaps more significant, however, was Tom Wolfe's presence at the festival, which he would later write about in his article, "What If He Is Right?", published in New York Magazine and Wolfe's own The Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, however, their work had only a moderate effect on McLuhan's eventual celebrity: they later claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of [McLuhan's] genius by about six months."^[89] In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in Life Magazine, Harper's, Fortune, Esquire, and others. Cartoons about him appeared in The New Yorker.^[7] In 1969 Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with him.^[90]

McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase Turn on, tune in, drop out by its popularizer, Timothy Leary in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"^[91]

During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau^[92] and Jerry Brown. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan with his now famous 15 minutes of fame quote. When asked in the 70s for a way to sedate violences in Angola, he suggested a massive spread of TV devices.^[93] In 1991 McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of Wired Magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication.^[94] He is mentioned by name in a Peter Gabriel-penned lyric in the song "Broadway Melody of 1974". This song appears on the concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, from progressive rock band Genesis. The lyric is: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin' head buried in the sand." McLuhan is also jokingly referred to during an episode of The Sopranos entitled House Arrest. Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a Wired mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for Wired that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."^[94]

A new centre known as the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, formed soon after his death in 1980, is the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and since 1994 it has been part of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information. The first director was literacy scholar and OISE professor David R. Olsen. From 1983 until 2008, the McLuhan Program was under the direction of Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove who was McLuhan's student and translator. Since 2008 Professor Dominique Scheffel-Dunand has been Director of the Program.

McLuhan's argument about the medium is the message has been touted regularly with regards to the ways in which the Internet and digital technology are influencing human development and thinking. Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupider" and his follow up book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is the most widely popular of these arguments.

Notes[link]