McLuhan, Herbert Marshall. Marshall McLuhan's media theory: how did we end up in the global village? Marshall McLuhan as a modern media theorist

The writer Tom Wolfe once said that he considers McLuhan to be the most outstanding thinker, on a par with Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said: "I think he had the intuition of a genius." McLuhan's aphorisms and sayings such as "The medium is the message" and "Global village" are firmly embedded in Western mentality and culture. McLuhan predicted the effect of television on society, the essence and nature of advertising, as well as forty years ago clearly described the changes in society that we saw very recently, along with the advent of the Internet.

Marshall McLuhan is one of the most prominent theoreticians of the 20th century. in the field of culture and communication. He himself was an excellent resourceful communicator, able to easily build bridges between science and popular culture. His results at the Toronto Center for Culture and Technology brought him scientific fame and made him in the 1960s. one of the iconic figures of pop culture. His work on the relationship between culture and communication has had a significant impact on advertising; his two most famous books, The Mechanical Bride and Culture is Our Business, focused on the advertising industry. His work has had and continues to have a significant impact on the course of discussions on the problems of globalization.

Introduction

M. McLuhan became famous for his two expressions: "global village", implying a growing trend towards global cultural convergence, and "the medium is a message (message)", taking into account the impact of technology on communications. He strove to spread the ideas embedded in them in various ways. His books are often a practical expression of the idea that "the medium is the message"; illustrations, photographs and unusual presentation schemes are complemented by the statements of psychologists, sociologists and writers such as James Joyce and Thomas Eliot. Critics argued that his work was not novel and that their main themes had already been developed by other authors.

Biography

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Manitoba, he completed his doctoral dissertation at Harvard and in 1936 received his first teaching position at the University of Wisconsin. He then taught at the University of St. Louis and, after returning to Canada in 1946, at the University of Toronto.

For the first time the name of M. McLuhan gained fame after the publication in 1951 of the book "The Mechanical Bride", dedicated to the American advertising industry. In 1952 M. McLuhan became a professor, and in 1953-1955. led seminars on culture and communication, organized by the Ford Foundation. Then he became interested in the impact of new technologies on the media; the result of this enthusiasm was the appearance in 1962 of the book "The Gutenberg Galaxy" ("Gutenberg Galaxy"). In 1963, M. McLuhan founded the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

International fame brought him the publication of the book "Understanding Media" (1964) and in the 1960-1970s. M. McLuhan began to gain more and more influence as a theorist of the problems of the relationship between culture, media and technology, as well as the author of publications on this topic. More than a dozen books and hundreds of articles by M. McLuhan were devoted to technology ("War and Peace in the Global Village"), art ("Through the Vanishing Point") ) and advertising (“Culture is Our Business”). He has advised many world leaders, including Jimmy Carter and Pierre Trudeau, and in 1975 was appointed by the Vatican to advise the Commission on Social Communication. M. McLuhan has received many prestigious titles and awards, including he was a Fellow of the Royal Scientific Society of Canada (1964) and a Knight Commander of the Order of Canada (1970). He died in 1980 while working on several books and preparing to speak at a major international conference in the United States.

Best of the day

Main contribution

There are three main themes in the works of M. McLuhan. The first is devoted to the consideration of the concept of art as a cognitive process related to the symbolic means that are present in various visual appeals - from works of art to advertising. The second theme relates to the use of technology as a way to empower people; its essence lies in the fact that the content of any message is inevitably influenced by the technology used to disseminate it. The third theme is determined by M. McLuhan's conviction that the process of human development passed through two epochs, primitive and industrial, or "typographic", and entered the third - technological.

The fact that M. McLuhan, in his first work devoted to the consideration of art as a process of cognition, focused on the problem of advertising, is typical of his approach to the search for the relationship between art and pop culture. In "The Mechanical Bride," he analyzed several samples of print ads, demonstrating the presence of symbolic elements in each one. His conclusion was that advertising is becoming a form of folklore; he returns to this topic in Culture is Our Business, where he describes advertising as "twentieth century cave art." However, the scientist's attitude to advertising was not unequivocally positive:

“Our time is the first era in which many thousands of well-educated individuals have made it their constant occupation to penetrate into the collective public mind. The purpose of such penetration is to carry out manipulation, exploitation and control. Its design is to create coercion, not conditions for deliberate action. Keeping each person in a helpless state generated by prolonged mental habit is the result of both advertising and entertainment (1951: v). "

The creation of Understanding Media marked the beginning of M. McLuhan's development of his second major theme - the impact of technology on the media. The analysis began with these words:

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to fragmentation and separation of all things as a means of control, it is sometimes somewhat shocking to remind you that in reality the medium itself is the message. Simply put, the personal and social consequences of using any media means, that is, any expansion of ourselves, are the result of the application of a new system of calculus, which is introduced into our lives through the development of our personality or any new technology. "

Further, M. McLuhan describes the negative and positive effects of the manifestation of this rule. For example, automation replaces human labor; but it also creates new roles for people in relation to their previous work, replacing the connections destroyed by the machine revolution. The same conclusion is drawn with regard to the media; mankind, using the printing press, made the transition from oral culture to written culture, but television and radio again returned people to oral culture.

The concept of a circular process, or the return of mankind to previous forms of existence with the help of new technologies, is the essence of the third theme of M. McLuhan's works. "If the technology of I. Gutenberg reproduced the ancient world and threw it to the knees of the Renaissance," wrote M. McLuhan, "then electrical technologies reproduced the primitive and archaic worlds, past and present, private and corporate, and threw them on the threshold of the West for processing."

Perhaps the best summary of McLuhan's main ideas can be found in the book Laws of Media, published a few years after his death. He originally intended to prepare a second edition of Understanding Media, but then his research went beyond the scope of the original book. In this work, M. McLuhan established four fundamental principles and gave a clarification of their features for communicators operating in each of the areas, including advertising. These principles have been formulated as follows:

1. Each technology enhances the capabilities of a specific organ or a specific ability of the user.

2. When one of the areas of sensation is heightened or intensified, the other is weakened or suppressed.

3. Each form, brought to the limit of its capabilities, changes its characteristics.

Usually, formulating these "laws", M. McLuhan insisted that the definition of "law" corresponds to that given by K. Popper: a scientific law is established in such a way as to ensure the possibility of its falsification. M. McLuhan was well aware that the time will come when the perception of laws will change, and his theories will be treated as outdated.

Performance evaluation

S. Neil noted that it is rather difficult to criticize M. McLuhan's ideas, since his reputation is so high that it has a significant impact on their perception by people. To a certain extent, M. McLuhan was living proof that the medium is a message: it is so difficult to separate this person from his ideas. S. Neil himself sharply criticized many of the theories of M. McLuhan as scientifically not proven, and possibly unprovable. He argues that Laws of Media is arguably the best book by M. McLuhan, as it contains evidence of underlying mental process theories.

J. Curtis notes that many of M. McLuhan's theories were put forward by other authors (Curtis, 1978). There is no doubt that the idea of ​​a global village was expressed by L. Mumford within the framework of his concept of “the only person in the world” (Mumford, 1961). At the same time, the theories of art and meanings by György Lukács and Franco Fortini are very reminiscent of the concepts developed by M. McLuhan. His historical theories take us back to Henry Bergson's model of history as a process.

Like most modernists, M. McLuhan largely overestimated the direct influence of printed publications and underestimated the spread of the handwritten word in the era preceding the appearance of I. Gutenberg; as a result, he paid more attention to technology at the expense of the education required to use it. In fact, the main obstacle to the assimilation of writing was the lack of education, not technology. His focus on the role of the media meant that at times M. McLuhan ignored the influence of other types of technology; the vehicle revolution has contributed as much to the creation of the global village as the communications revolution. It is interesting to note that M. McLuhan could not foresee the development of the computer revolution, which provided people with the ability to manipulate media, both before they were received, and at the time of their reception. From the idea of ​​a media medium as a message, we are moving on to a paradigm in which the viewer is the medium of information transmission.

As already noted, the idea of ​​the mutual influence of communications and culture, clearly stated by M. McLuhan, has not lost its significance to this day. His views continue to fuel the debate on globalization issues; Such adherents of this trend as T. Levitt owe much to M. McLuhan. Here is how B. Day summed up the scientist's influence on the advertising industry: “M. McLuhan communicates something that every good advertising professional takes personally, although he rarely approaches anything with this degree of formalization. " The idea that the media used can have more impact than the message itself is vital for advertisers. B. Day singles out five points extremely important for advertisers in the works of M. McLuhan:

3. Each media should be used where it will be most effective.

4. The audience should be involved in the process as much as possible.

5. The image should always tell the "real" story.

M. McLuhan's views on the meaning of language and symbols are less known, but also extremely important. The influence of the emerging in the 1990s. technical media, such as satellite television, which swept our entire planet, is obvious, but M. McLuhan defined the means of disseminating information as any "self-expansion" and, based on this, included images and words in more ordinary communicative forms. He felt that language was the most powerful metaphor of all. In one of his last letters to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, M. McLuhan wrote:

“A speaker who speaks any language believes that this language is a medium or a mask through which he perceives the world in a special way and connects with people ... Words spoken by a lawyer, judge or bureaucrat have a different meaning than the same words spoken by friends or foes ... the effects of language as a means of conveying information are completely different from the input or implied meanings of words. All original words have secondary meanings that are usually considered by the speaker or the person transmitting the text as irrelevant. "

Marshall McLuhan was one of the most famous and most clearly expressed his ideas specialist on the problems of changes in communications, culture and society in the second half of the XX century. His observations on the development of new technologies, media and communications are of great importance to psychologists and sociologists, as well as to business representatives, especially those involved in advertising and marketing. However, on a deeper level, M. McLuhan's remarks about language and symbols are valuable for all forms of human interaction. The statement that “the media is a message” has itself become an element of folklore and remains a symbol of M. McLuhan's theoretical and practical achievements.

Main dates of life:

Studied at the University of Manitoba (bachelor's and master's degrees); received his doctorate from Cambridge;

In 1939 he married Corinne Lewis;

In 1946 he began teaching at the University of Toronto, where he was promoted to professor in 1952;

In 1953-1955. was the leader of seminars on culture and communication, conducted by the Ford Foundation;

In 1963 he founded the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto;

In 1977 he played himself in Woody Allen's film "Annie Hall";

The essence of the technology from the master mind
Rjust 27.05.2018 01:46:56

Expansions of our physical and nervous systems aimed at increasing energy (power) and increasing speed. In fact, if such an increase in energy and speed did not occur, new external expansions of us either would not appear at all, or would be thrown away.

McLuhan Herbert Marshall(McLuhan Herbert Marshall) (07.21.1911, Edmonton, Canada - 12.31.1980, Toronto, Canada) - Canadian philosopher, sociologist, philologist, professor of English literature (doctoral dissertation on the work of Shakespeare's contemporary T. Nash, 1942). Since 1952, professor at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, where in 1963 he headed the Center for Culture and Technology (main research areas: the impact of information technology on the human psyche and society). Since the beginning of the 1960s, his culturological concepts have been gaining popularity, announcing the decisive role of communication technologies (primarily television) in the formation and development of mass society.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962, Canadian Government Prize) outlines the concept of communication technology change as the engine of historical progress and the basis of social organization. The creation of writing, according to McLuhan, ultimately led to the onset of an era of absolute power of visualization. Literacy gave rise to the splitting of the personality, the loss of the organizing role of tribalism, and de-collectivization. Typography contributed to the ordering and stabilization of languages ​​and, by making the nation homogeneous, contributed to the development of individualism. A new electronic galaxy penetrates into the "Gutenberg galaxy", as a result of which familiar attitudes take the form of a grotesque, and familiar social institutions become a threat to him. The new electronic interdependence is returning the world to a global village situation.

In arguing the concept, McLuhan repeatedly turns to Shakespeare's work, finding in it evidence in favor of the assertion about the decisive role of changing communication strategies and means in social and individual development. At the same time, in this specific aspect of analysis, he makes a number of important observations about the meanings that Shakespeare put into the images of his works.

The most thoroughly analyzed in this vein is "King Lear", to which three extensive fragments in the initial part of "Gutenberg's Galaxy" are specially devoted.

Describing Lear's plan for dividing the kingdom, McLuhan emphasizes: “When King Lear reveals his 'dark purpose' to divide the kingdom into parts, he thereby expresses politically impudent and avant-garde for the early seventeenth century intent ... Lear offers a highly modern idea of ​​the delegation of power by the center to the periphery. Elizabethan audiences should have immediately recognized left Machiavellianism in this “dark target”. In the early seventeenth century, new forms of power and organization that had been controversial over the previous century began to be felt in all spheres of public and private life. “King Lear” presents a new strategy of culture and power in terms of its impact on the state, family and psychology of the individual ... ”(McLuen, 2003: 16).

The interpretation of the images of Edmund, Goneril and Regan is presented in accordance with the trends of the times: “Edmund is presented as a force of nature, eccentric in relation to human experience as such and to the“ curse of prejudice ”. He is an active participant in the fragmentation of human institutions. Lear himself with his inspired idea of ​​establishing a constitutional monarchy by delegating power is also a great fragmentator. The plan he had outlined for himself leads to specialization ... Having caught his plan, Goneril and Regan vied with each other in the expression of filial devotion. Lear himself creates a rift between them, insisting on divisive competition in eloquence ... Individualism and competition have become a real scandal for a society that has long worn the outfit of corporate and collective values. It is well known what role typography played in establishing new cultural patterns. But a natural consequence of the specializing influence of new forms of knowledge, among others, was that all manifestations of power took on the character of pronounced centralism. While the feudal monarchy was inclusive, since the king, in fact, included all his subjects, the Renaissance duke sought to become an exclusive center of power, surrounded by his independent subjects. The result of this centralism, itself dependent on improved routes and trade, was the custom of delegating power and functional specialization to different areas and individuals. In King Lear, as in other plays, Shakespeare demonstrates an unmistakable foresight of the social and individual consequences of the gradual exposure of attributes and functions in the name of speed, accuracy and strengthening of power ”(Ibid. Pp. 17-18).

For McLuhan's concept, the theme of visualization is essential, which he also emphasizes in his interpretation of King Lear, where the theme of blindness gives him great scope for interpretation: “Exposing the very human feelings as such will be one of the themes of this play. The separation of sight from other senses was already evident in Lear's words about his "dark purpose" and in the fact that he relies only on a visual map. And if Goneril is ready to lose sight as an expression of devotion, then Regan ... is ready to lose all human feelings while Lear's love is with her ... The destruction of the proportional relationship between minds (or feelings), people and their functions is the main theme of the later Shakespeare "(Ibid. P. 19). With this in mind, McLuhan contrasts Cordelia and her sisters: “Her rational integrity is the exact opposite of her sisters' specialization. She does not know a fixed point of view, relying on which she could pour out the stream of her eloquence. On the contrary, her sisters, due to their inherent fragmentation of feelings and the desire for accurate calculation, are sensitive to the demands of the moment. Like Lear, they are driven by avant-garde Machiavellian convictions, which forces them to act “according to science” in every situation. They are resolute and free not only from the “spiritual principle of feeling”, but also from its moral analogue - “conscience”. After all, it is this rational mediator between human motives that "turns us all into cowards." And Cordelia behaves like a coward, for she is burdened by numerous difficulties, the source of which is her conscience, her mind and her role ”(Ibid. P. 20).

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (21 July 1911 - 31 December 1980) is a Canadian philosopher, philologist, literary critic, theorist of the impact of artifacts as a means of communication.

He is best known for his research on the formative impact of electrical and electronic communications on individuals and society (for example, in the concept of a "global village", "absolutely ensuring disagreement on all issues" - McLuhan: Hot & Cool, NY, Signet Books published by The New American Library, Inc., 1967, p. 286)

Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in the city of Edmonton (the capital of the province of Alberta, Canada) into a Methodist family. Marshall was a family name that was used in everyday communication. His parents, Elsie Naomi and Herbert Ernest, were born and have lived their entire lives in Canada.

In addition to Marshall, they had another son, Maurice, who was born in 1913. McLuhan's mother was first a teacher at a Baptist school and then an actress. Before the outbreak of World War I, the family lived in Edmonton, where McLuhan's father had a small real estate business.

With the outbreak of the war, my father was mobilized into the Canadian army, where he served for about a year. In 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, the capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba.

In 1928, Marshall McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada), where he received a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1933 and a master's degree in English studies (English studies) in 1934.

During his studies, he began to publish small notes in periodicals. So, already in 1930, the first article by McLuhan appeared in the student newspaper of the University of Manitoba entitled "McAlway is this man."

An increased interest in English literature prompted him in 1934 to enter Trinity Hall College, Cambridge University (England). There he studied under the guidance of well-known representatives of the new criticism I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis.

In 1936 he received his BA from Cambridge University and after returning to North America began teaching activities at the University of Wisconsin (Madison, USA) as an assistant.

In 1937, Marshall McLuhan converted to Catholicism. From 1937 to 1944 (with a short break in 1939-1940, when he left for Cambridge to get a master's degree) he taught English literature at the Catholic University of St. Louis (St. Louis, USA).

There he met his future wife Corina Lewis, whom he married in 1939. Marshall and Corina's marriage was happy. They raised six children.

In December 1943, McLuhan received his Ph.D. with a thesis entitled The Place of Thomas Nash in the Learning of his Time. After that, in 1944, McLuhan returned to Canada, where in 1944-1946 he taught at the Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.

Moving to Toronto in 1946, he began teaching at St Michael's Catholic College at the University of Toronto. The main scientific and creative achievements of Marshall Mulcuen are associated with the University of Toronto.

It was there that in 1952 he became a professor and published most of his books. A huge influence on the direction of McLuhan's scientific research had an acquaintance with a colleague at the university, the famous Canadian economist Harold Innis (Harold Innis).

From 1953-1955 McLuhan was the leader of seminars on culture and communication, supported by the Ford Foundation. Then in 1963 he founded the Center for Culture and Technology.

The scientific and journalistic activities of Marshall McLuhan received great recognition. In 1964, he became a Fellow of the Royal Scientific Society of Canada, and in 1970, a Knight Commander of the Order of Canada. In 1975, McLuhan was appointed advisor to the Vatican's Public Relations Commission.

In the late 1960s, McLuhan's health began to deteriorate rapidly. In 1967, he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, in 1979 - a heart attack. Marshall McLuhan died on December 31, 1980 in Toronto.

Marshall McLuhan is the author of a significant number of articles and books, many of which are co-authored. Among the main works published in separate editions, the following should be highlighted: "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of an Industrial Man" (1951), "Gutenberg's Galaxy: The Formation of a Printing Man" (1962), "Understanding Media: External Extensions of Man" (1964), "Media - this message: Inventory of Consequences (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), War and Peace in the Global Village (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), From Cliché to Archetype (1970, co-authored with Wilfred Watson) , The City as a Classroom (1977, co-authored with Catherine Hutchon and Eric McLuhan).

Marshall McLuhan's views and direction of research have undergone some evolution. If at the early stages of his activity he can be classified as a "traditional" literary critic who criticize modern society, blaming him for the decline of interest in classical literature, the passivity of the masses, the technological manipulation of their consciousness, etc., then later critical pathos disappeared.

Beginning in the 1950s, McLuhan “proposed studying popular culture in its own terms, rather than in terms of classical traditional culture.

Culture was given a definition of a communication system, and McLuhan refused to analyze the intellectual and moral content of culture, that is, from a qualitative, value-based approach. "

At the same time, McLuhan managed to make unusually interesting observations in the field of the influence of electronic media on modern society. In a surprising way, the literary critic has become one of the most respected authors in the field of communication theory.

Marshall McLuhan's first major work, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man, was one of the first in the field of popular culture research.

Interest in the critical study of pop culture was sparked by the book by the famous British literary critic and culturologist Frank Leavis "Culture and Environment", published in 1933.

Also a great influence was exerted by the prominent American sociologist David Risman, who consulted McLuhan on the problem of consumer society. The title of the book, The Mechanical Bride, was taken from a play by the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

Like all subsequent works, Marshall McLuhan's first book is written in a "mosaic" style. It consists of many small chapters, which do not need to be read in the order in which they are presented.

The fact is that "to study his subject - mass culture and mass communication - McLuhan uses his language and style."

Since the main form of presenting information in modern media is collage or, in McLuhan's terms, mosaic, therefore this style of presentation is used in all of his works.

That is why on one page of scientific works performed by McLuhan you can find quotes from Shakespeare and the tabloid newspaper.

McLuhan, in his introduction to the book, points out that modern folklore is the product of the intellectual activity of a huge army of professionals: advertising agents, writers, screenwriters, artists, directors, designers, journalists, scientists, etc.

All of them create in the mass consciousness a permanent feeling of insufficiency and lack of various material and non-material objects.

The state of "dissatisfaction" in the mass consciousness is necessary for the maintenance of mass consumption and the development of the capitalist economy.

At the same time, the form of information presentation is of particular importance: the process of simultaneous audiovisual impression is so powerful that the viewer simply cannot think rationally and critically perceive this information.

McLuhan's task in this book is reduced to showing the hidden forms of influence on the mass consciousness in different forms mass communication: advertising, television broadcasts, films, etc.

Each chapter of the book is an isolated work and is devoted to the analysis of one or another aspect of popular culture. One of the chapters, The Mechanical Bride, gave the title to the entire book. In it, McLuhan examines the problem of the relationship between sex and technology in modern culture.

An example is an advertisement for tights "On a pedestal". This ad features pantyhose feet on a pedestal. At the same time, the human body is absent. McLuhan points out that this is a typical ad business trick: focusing on the product or service being sold.

As a result, “the importance of sex is abnormally exaggerated, thanks to the use of market mechanisms and industrial production techniques ... The attitude to sex as a behavioral problem, reducing sexual experience to the level of mechanical and hygienic problems, is latent and manifested in everything. This makes a disagreement between physical pleasure and reproductive function inevitable, and is also the cause of homosexuality. "

The book "Gutenberg's Galaxy" received an award from the Government of Canada and made McLuhan's name very famous among the scientific community. In this book, McLuhan tried to answer the question: how communication technologies (mainly writing and printing) affect the organization of cognitive processes in society.

In many ways, this work should be seen as a continuation of the research of Harold Innis. McLuhan states openly that Innis “became the first person to accidentally discover the process of change inherent in and accompanying the emergence of mass communications. Gutenberg's Galaxy is essentially a footnote to Innis's work. "

Stages of development of civilization according to McLuhan
* primitive preliterate culture with oral forms of communication and transmission of information, based on the principles of a collective way of life, perception and understanding of the surrounding world;
* written and printed culture ("Gutenberg's galaxy"), the era of dadactism and nationalism, which replaced naturalness and collectivism with individualism, de-collectivization and detribalization;
* the modern stage of the "global village", which revives the natural audiovisual, multidimensional perception of the world and collectivity, but on a new electronic basis - through the replacement of written and printed languages ​​of communication with radio-television and network mass communications.

Marshall McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" was one of the first studies in the field of media ecology. According to McLuhan, the media should become objects of research on their own, regardless of their content (content).

The main idea is that the mass media (communications) affects society primarily not by its content, but by those characteristics that distinguish it from other media.

The simplest medium is electric light, which creates the environment through mere presence. “Electric light is pure information.

It is, so to speak, a means of communication without a message. " Electric light does not have any content, but it nevertheless allowed people to make good use of the night time and made economic activity modern society around the clock.

Similarly, television, radio, newspapers and other media have a huge and unpredictable impact on the development of society by the very fact of their existence.

However, these effects go unnoticed due to the fact that researchers are primarily interested in the meaning of the transmitted messages. McLuhan formulated the need to study hidden media effects in the famous saying "The Medium is the Message".

According to McLuhan, all media can be divided into two large groups. The main classification criterion is the level of involvement of the information consumer in the communication process.

Information transmitted by means of different information carriers requires a different degree of user involvement.

Since the main result of the consumption of information is the extraction of meaning, the media are distinguished that present information in a convenient form that does not require additional efforts to comprehend, and an inconvenient form that requires additional efforts from the information consumer.

Thus, television undoubtedly turns out to be a convenient form of information consumption when the viewer is provided with maximum comfort and convenience.

But books (especially scientific ones) undoubtedly turn out to be an uncomfortable carrier of information, requiring maximum attention from the reader and additional inclusion of the imagination.

Thus, there are “hot” media, which use the maximum number of perception mechanisms (audiovisual), and “cold” media, which use one, at most two ways of transmitting information and force the recipient to strain his imagination to “conjecture” the meaning of the information.

As an example of the first type of media, we can cite the already mentioned television, and as an example of the second - also the mentioned books.

When this book went on sale, it seemed to many that the last word of the title was mistaken, and that the real title of the book is McLuhan's famous aphorism "the medium is the message".

However, due to the change of one letter in the word "massage", at least two new meanings appeared: "a medium as a massage", something that strokes, massages a person, gradually changing the laws of perception, and "a medium as an age of the masses" (Mass Age ).

The book is the result of McLuhan's collaboration with renowned designer and photographer Quentin Fiore, who used collages and photographs to frame McLuhan's aphorisms and main ideas.

Marshall McLuhan had a great and versatile influence in science, culture, philosophy, etc. So, in the cinema, the traces of his ideas were most clearly manifested in the work of David Cronenberg and especially in the film "Videodrome". In 1977, McLuhan played himself in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall.

There are also many followers of McLuhan's ideas in fiction, especially among the representatives of cyberpunk. In the scientific community, McLuhan, along with Harold Innis, is regarded as the founder of "medium theory" in the field of the sociology of mass communication. In the field of philosophy, McLuhan's ideas are in line with the current of postmodernism.

Some sayings about Marshall McLuhan
* Writer and publicist Tom Wolfe has suggested that McLuhan is perhaps the most significant thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.
* Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who met with McLuhan, said: "I think he had a genius intuition."
* Researcher of global infocommunications Manuel Castells assigned McLuhan the place of "the great visionary who ... revolutionized the understanding of perception and thinking in the field of communications."

Movies about Marshall McLuhan
* McLuhan's Wake, dir. Kevin McMahon
* Marshall McLuhan's ABC, dir. David Soubelman
* Research McLuhan (The McLuhan Probes) dir. David Soubelman
* Out Of Orbit dir. Carl Besse

Interesting Facts
* The Oxford English Dictionary contains 346 McLuhan references.
* In 1989, that is, nine years after his death, the book "Global Village" (co-authored with Bruce Powers) was published.
* In 1995, an e-mail "interview" with McLuhan was published in Wired magazine.

, “Absolutely securing disagreement on all matters” - McLuhan: Hot & Cool, NY, Signet Books published by The New American Library, Inc., 1967, p. 286).

Biography

The scientific and journalistic activities of Marshall McLuhan received great recognition. In 1964 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1970 he became a Knight Commander of the Order of Canada. In 1975, McLuhan was appointed advisor to the Vatican's Public Relations Commission.

In the late 1960s, McLuhan's health began to deteriorate rapidly. In 1967, he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, in 1979 - a stroke. Marshall McLuhan died on December 31, 1980 in Toronto.

Main works

Marshall McLuhan is the author of a significant number of articles and books, many of which are co-authored. Among the main works that came out in separate editions, the following should be highlighted: "The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of an Industrial Man" (), "Gutenberg's Galaxy: The Becoming of a Printing Man" (), "Understanding Media: External Extensions of Man" (), "Media is a message : A Checklist of Consequences (co-authored with Quentin Fiore), War and Peace in the Global Village (co-authored with Quentin Fiore), From Cliché to Archetype (co-authored with Wilfred Watson), The City as a Classroom "(Co-authored with Catherine Hutchon and Eric McLuhan).

Marshall McLuhan's views and lines of research have evolved. If at the early stages of his activity he can be attributed to the "traditional" literary scholars who criticize modern society, blaming him for the decline of interest in classical literature, the passivity of the masses, the technological manipulation of their consciousness, etc., then later critical pathos disappeared. Beginning in the 1950s, McLuhan “proposed studying popular culture in its own terms, rather than in terms of classical traditional culture. Culture was given a definition of a communication system, and McLuhan refused to analyze the intellectual and moral content of culture, that is, from a qualitative, value-based approach. " At the same time, McLuhan managed to make unusually interesting observations in the field of the influence of electronic media on modern society. In an amazing way, the literary critic has become one of the most respected authors in the field of communication theory.

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of an Industrial Man (1951)

Marshall McLuhan's first major work, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man, was one of the first in the field of popular culture research. Interest in the critical study of pop culture was sparked by the book by the famous British literary critic and cultural scholar Frank Leavis "Culture and Environment", published in 1933. Also a great influence was exerted by the prominent American sociologist David Risman, who consulted McLuhan on the problem of consumer society. The title of the book, The Mechanical Bride, was taken from a play by the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

Like all subsequent works, Marshall McLuhan's first book is written in a mosaic style. It consists of many small chapters that do not need to be read sequentially. The fact is that "to study his subject - mass culture and mass communication - McLuhan uses his language and style." The main form of presenting messages by the mass media is, according to McLuhan, mosaic, and the same way of presentation is used by him in other works. On one page of his writings, you can find, for example, quotes from Shakespeare and the tabloid newspaper and much more.

In the introduction to the book, McLuhan notes that modern folklore is the product of the intellectual activity of a huge army of professionals: advertising agents, writers, screenwriters, artists, directors, designers, journalists, scientists, etc. All of them, day after day, create a feeling in the mass consciousness incomplete understanding of what is happening. The state of "dissatisfaction" in the mass consciousness is necessary to maintain the "prestigious" form of mass consumption. McLuhan's task in this book boils down to showing hidden forms of influence on mass consciousness in various forms of mass communication: advertising, television broadcasts, cinema, etc.

Each chapter of the book is an isolated work and is devoted to the analysis of one or another aspect of popular culture. One of the chapters, The Mechanical Bride, gave the title to the entire book. In it, the author examines the problem of the relationship between sex and technology in modern culture. An example is an advertisement for tights "On a pedestal". This ad features pantyhose feet on a pedestal. As a result, “the importance of sex is abnormally exaggerated thanks to the use of market mechanisms and industrial production techniques ... The attitude towards sex as a behavioral problem, which reduces sexual experience to the level of mechanical and hygienic problems, is latent and manifests itself in everything. This makes a disagreement between physical pleasure and reproductive function inevitable, and is also the cause of homosexuality. "

Gutenberg's Galaxy: Becoming a Typing Man (1962)

The book "Gutenberg's Galaxy" received an award from the Government of Canada and made McLuhan's name very famous among the scientific community. In this book, McLuhan answers the question: how communication technologies (mainly writing and printing) affect the organization of cognitive processes in society. In many ways, this work should be seen as a continuation of the research of Harold Innis. According to Marshall McLuhan, Innis “became the first person to accidentally discover the process of change inherent in and accompanying the emergence of mass communications. Gutenberg's Galaxy can be understood as a footnote to Innis's work. "

Stages of development of civilization according to McLuhan

Understanding Media: The External Extensions of Man (1964)

Marshall McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" was one of the first studies in the field of media ecology. According to McLuhan, the media should become objects of research on their own, regardless of their content (content). The basic idea is that the medium of communication affects the individual and society in and of itself.

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

When this book went on sale, it seemed to many that the last word of the title was mistaken, and that the real title of the book was McLuhan's famous aphorism “the medium is the message”. However, due to the change of one letter in the word "massage", at least two new meanings appeared: "a means of communication as massage" and "a means of communication as a century of the masses" (Mass Age). The book is the result of a collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and renowned designer and photographer Quentin Fiore, who used collages and photographs to frame McLuhan's aphorisms and main ideas.

Influence

The works of Marshall McLuhan continue to have a significant and multifaceted influence on science, culture and philosophy. In cinematography, traces of his ideas are clearly manifested in the work of David Cronenberg and especially in the film "Videodrome". In 1977, McLuhan played himself in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall. There are also many followers of McLuhan's ideas in fiction, including among the representatives of cyberpunk. In the scientific community, McLuhan, along with Harold Innis, is regarded as the founder of modern communication theory. In philosophy, McLuhan's ideas are sometimes brought closer to postmodernism, although he himself distanced himself from it.

Some sayings about Marshall McLuhan

• Writer and publicist Tom Wolfe has suggested that McLuhan is perhaps the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.
• Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who met with McLuhan, said: "I think he had a genius intuition."
• The researcher of global infocommunications Manuel Castells assigned McLuhan the place of "the great visionary who ... revolutionized the understanding of perception and thinking in the field of communications."

Movies about Marshall McLuhan

• McLuhan's Awakening McLuhan's Wake), dir. Kevin McMahon
• Marshall McLuhan's ABC Marshall McLuhan's ABC), dir. David Soubelman
• McLuhan's research (eng. The McLuhan Probes) dir. David Soubelman
• Out of orbit (eng. Out of orbit) dir. Carl Besse

Write a review on McLuhan, Marshall

Literature

In English

• McLuhan M., The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. - N.Y .: The Vanguard Press, 1951.
• McLuhan M., The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. - Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
• McLuhan M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. - N.Y .: McGraw Hill, 1964.
• McLuhan M., Fiore Q. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. - N.Y .: Random House, 1967.
• McLuhan M., Fiore Q. War and Peace in the Global Village. - N.Y .: Bantam, 1968.
• McLuhan M., Parker H. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. - N.Y .: Harper & Row, 1968.
• McLuhan M., Culture is Our Business. - N.Y .: McGraw Hill, 1970.
• McLuhan M., Watson W. From Cliche to Archetype. - N.Y .: Viking, 1970.
• McLuhan M., Hutchon K., McLuhan E. - City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. The Book Society of Canada Limited, 1977.

In Russian

• Marshall McLuhan. Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of a Typographic Man = The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. - M .: Academic project, 2005 .-- 496 p. - ISBN 5-902357-28-4.
• Marshall McLuhan. Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of a Typographic Man = The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. - 2nd ed. - M .: Academic Project, Gaudeamus, 2013 .-- 496 p. - (Concepts). - 500 copies - ISBN 978-5-98426-125-8, 978-5-8291-1479-4.
• Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. - M .: Kuchkovo field, 2007 .-- 464 p. - ISBN 978-5-901679-58-6.

• Marshall McLuhan(Russian) = Press: Government by Newsleak // Domestic notes: magazine / per. Ruslana Khestanova. - 2003. - No. 3.
• Marshall McLuhan TV. Timid Giant (Russian) = The Timid Giant // Television "87 / per .: V. P. Terin. - M ..
• Marshall McLuhan(rus.) = The Timid Giant // Modern problems of personality: journal / per .: Grigorieva Arkadieva. - M .: Publishing house "Ikusstvo", 2001. - No. 1. - S. 138-148.

• Marshall McLuhan With the advent of Sputnik, the planet has become a global theater, in which there are no spectators, but only actors (Russian) // Centaur / per. V.P. Terin. - M., 1994. - No. 1. - S. 20-31.

Bibliography

In English

• W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape Into Understanding. A Biography. - Toronto: Basic Books, 1997 .-- 480 p. - ISBN 1-58423-144-0, ISBN 1-58423-112-2.
• Paul Levinson. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. - N.Y .: Routledge, 1999 .-- 240 p. - ISBN 978-0-415-19251-4.
• Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. - Rev Sub edition. - Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998 .-- 322 p. - ISBN 978-0-262-63186-0.
• Meyrowitz J. Medium Theory // Communication Theory Today / Ed. by David Crowley and David Mitchell. - Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 .-- ISBN 978-0-7456-1289-8.
• Jonathan Miller. Marshall McLuhan. - N.Y .: Viking Press, 1971. - 133 p. - ISBN 0-670-45876-7.

In Russian

• // Russian magazine. 2001.19 April.
• // Kommersant-Money. 2001. No. 28. July 18. (unavailable link - history)
• // Independent newspaper. 2004.17 September.
• Kozlova N. N., Criticism of the concept of "mass culture" by Marshall McLuhan. Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. degree of candidate of philosophical sciences. - M .: Publishing house of Moscow University, 1976.
• // Pushkin. 1998. No. 5 (11). July 1.
• // SMI.ru. 2000.14 January
• // Notes of the Fatherland. 2003. No. 4.
• .
• Terin V.P., Mass communication. Study of the experience of the West. Second edition, revised and enlarged. M., 2000.
• // Elitarium, www.elitarium.ru (unavailable link - history)
• Tsarev V. Yu.,. Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. degree of candidate of philosophical sciences. - M., 1989.
• Tsarev V. Yu., - M., Rospisatel, 2015.
• Arkhangelskaya I.B. Herbert Marshall McLuhan: From Literature Research to Media Theory. Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. Doctor of Philology. - M .: MGU, 2009 /edu.of.ru/attach/17/44234.doc
• Arkhangelskaya I. B. Herbert Marshall McLuhan: From Literature Research to Mass Media Theory. - Publishing house of Moscow. University, 2007 .-- 210 p.
• Arkhangelskaya I.B. Marshall McLuhan. Nizhny Novgorod: NKI, 2010.293 p.
• Arkhangelskaya I. B. Marshall McLuhan: The Road to Media Theory. - LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2011 .-- 384 p. - ISBN 978-3-8433-0879-3.

Notes (edit)

Links

• - in English
• - in English
• - in Russian
• Arkhangelskaya I.B. Herbert Marshall McLuhan: From Literature Research to Media Theory. Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. Doctor of Philology. - M .: MGU, 2009 /edu.of.ru/attach/17/44234.doc

Excerpt from McLuhan, Marshall

On the 24th there was a battle at the Shevardinsky redoubt, on the 25th not a single shot was fired from either side, on the 26th the Borodino battle took place.
For what and how were the battles at Shevardin and at Borodino given and accepted? Why was the Battle of Borodino given? It didn't make the slightest sense to either the French or the Russians. The closest result was and should have been - for the Russians, that we were close to the death of Moscow (which we feared most in the world), and for the French, that they were close to the death of the entire army (which they also feared the most in the world) ... This result was obvious at the same time, and meanwhile Napoleon gave, and Kutuzov accepted this battle.
If the generals were guided by reasonable reasons, it seemed how clear it should have been for Napoleon that, having gone two thousand miles and taking battle with the probable accident of losing a quarter of the army, he was going to certain death; and it should have seemed just as clear to Kutuzov that by accepting the battle and also risking losing a quarter of the army, he would probably lose Moscow. For Kutuzov it was mathematically clear, how clear is that if I have less than one checker in checkers and I change, I will probably lose and therefore should not change.
When the opponent has sixteen checkers, and I have fourteen, then I am only one-eighth weaker than him; and when I exchange thirteen checkers, he will be three times stronger than me.
Before the Battle of Borodino, our forces were approximately five to six of the French, and after the battle as one to two, that is, before the battle of one hundred thousand; one hundred and twenty, and after the battle fifty to a hundred. At the same time, the clever and experienced Kutuzov took up the battle. Napoleon, the genius commander, as he is called, gave battle, losing a quarter of his army and further stretching his line. If they say that, having occupied Moscow, he thought how to end the campaign by occupying Vienna, then there is a lot of evidence against this. The historians of Napoleon themselves say that he also wanted to stop from Smolensk, knew the danger of his extended position, knew that the occupation of Moscow would not be the end of the campaign, because from Smolensk he saw in what position the Russian cities were left to him, and did not receive a single answer to their repeated statements about the desire to negotiate.
Giving and accepting the Battle of Borodino, Kutuzov and Napoleon acted involuntarily and senselessly. And historians, under the accomplished facts, only later summed up cunning evidence of the foresight and genius of the commanders, who of all the involuntary instruments of world events were the most slavish and involuntary figures.
The ancients left us with samples of heroic poems, in which heroes constitute the whole interest of history, and we still cannot get used to the fact that for our human time a story of this kind does not make sense.
To another question: how the Borodino and the Shevardino battles that preceded it were given - there is also a very definite and well-known, completely false idea. All historians describe the case as follows:
The Russian army allegedly in its retreat from Smolensk was looking for the best position for a general battle, and such a position was allegedly found at Borodino.
The Russians allegedly fortified this position forward, to the left of the road (from Moscow to Smolensk), at an almost right angle to it, from Borodino to Utitsa, in the very place where the battle took place.
Ahead of this position, a fortified forward post on the Shevardinsky kurgan was supposedly set up to observe the enemy. On the 24th, it was as if Napoleon attacked the forward post and took it; On the 26th, he attacked the entire Russian army, which was stationed at the Borodino field.
This is what the stories say, and all this is completely unfair, as anyone who wants to understand the essence of the matter will easily see.
The Russians weren't looking for a better position; but, on the contrary, in their retreat they passed many positions that were better than Borodinskaya. They did not stop at any of these positions: both because Kutuzov did not want to accept the position he had not chosen, and because the demand for a popular battle had not yet been expressed strongly enough, and because Miloradovich had not yet approached with the militia, and also because other reasons that are incalculable. The fact is that the previous positions were stronger and that the Borodino position (the one on which the battle was given) is not only not strong, but for some reason is not at all a position more than any other place in the Russian Empire, which, guessing, would be pointed with a pin on the map.
The Russians not only did not fortify the position of the Borodino field to the left at a right angle from the road (that is, the place where the battle took place), but they never, until August 25, 1812, thought that a battle could take place at this place. This is proved, firstly, by the fact that not only on the 25th there were no fortifications on this place, but that, begun on the 25th, they were not completed on the 26th; secondly, the position of the Shevardinsky redoubt serves as a proof: the Shevardinsky redoubt, in front of the position at which the battle was accepted, does not make any sense. Why was this redoubt stronger than all the other points? And why, defending him on the 24th until late at night, were all efforts exhausted and six thousand people lost? A Cossack patrol was enough to observe the enemy. Thirdly, proof that the position at which the battle took place was not foreseen and that the Shevardinsky redoubt was not the forefront of this position is the fact that Barclay de Tolly and Bagration until the 25th were convinced that the Shevardinsky redoubt was left flank of the position and that Kutuzov himself, in his report, written in the heat of the moment after the battle, calls the Shevardinsky redoubt the left flank of the position. Much later, when reports on the Battle of Borodino were written in the open, it was (probably to justify the mistakes of the commander-in-chief, who has to be infallible) that unfair and strange testimony was invented that the Shevardinsky redoubt served as an advanced post (while it was only a fortified point of the left flank) and as if the battle of Borodino was taken by us on a fortified and pre-selected position, while it took place in a completely unexpected and almost unfortified place.
The case, obviously, was like this: the position was chosen along the Kolocha River, which crosses the main road not at a right, but at an acute angle, so that the left flank was in Shevardino, the right one near the village of Novy and the center in Borodino, at the confluence of the Kolocha and Vo rivers yny. This position, under the cover of the Kolocha River, for the army, aiming to stop the enemy moving along the Smolensk road to Moscow, is obvious to anyone who looks at the Borodino field, forgetting how the battle took place.
Napoleon, having left on the 24th to Valuev, did not see (as the stories say) the position of the Russians from Utitsa to Borodino (he could not see this position, because it was not there) and did not see the forward post of the Russian army, but stumbled upon the pursuit of the Russian rearguard to the left flank of the Russian position, to the Shevardinsky redoubt, and unexpectedly for the Russians, he transferred troops through Kolocha. And the Russians, not having time to enter the general battle, retreated with their left wing from the position they intended to take, and took up a new position, which was not foreseen and not fortified. Moving to the left side of Kolocha, to the left of the road, Napoleon moved the entire future battle from right to left (from the Russians) and transferred it to the field between Utitsa, Semyonovsky and Borodino (to this field, which has nothing more advantageous for the position than any another field in Russia), and on this field the entire battle took place on the 26th. In rough form, the plan for the intended battle and the battle that took place would be as follows:

If Napoleon had not left for Kolocha on the evening of the 24th and had not ordered to attack the redoubt in the evening, but would have started the attack the next morning, then no one would have doubted that the Shevardinsky redoubt was the left flank of our position; and the battle would have happened as we expected it. In that case, we would probably defend even more stubbornly the Shevardinsky redoubt, our left flank; would attack Napoleon in the center or on the right, and on the 24th a general engagement would take place in the position that was fortified and foreseen. But since the attack on our left flank took place in the evening, following the retreat of our rearguard, that is, immediately after the battle at Gridnevaya, and since the Russian commanders did not want or did not have time to start a general battle on the 24th evening, the first and main action of Borodinsky the battle was lost on the 24th and, obviously, led to the loss of the one that was given on the 26th.
After the loss of the Shevardinsky redoubt, by the morning of the 25th, we found ourselves out of position on the left flank and were forced to bend back our left wing and hastily strengthen it wherever it was.
But not only did the Russian troops stand only under the protection of weak, unfinished fortifications on August 26, the disadvantage of this situation was increased by the fact that the Russian commanders, not fully recognizing the fact that they had completely accomplished (the loss of position on the left flank and the transfer of the entire future battlefield from right to left ), remained in their extended position from the village of Novy to Utitsa and, as a result, had to move their troops during the battle from right to left. Thus, during the entire battle, the Russians had twice the weakest forces against the entire French army aimed at our left wing. (The actions of Poniatovsky against Utitsa and Uvarov on the right flank of the French were separate from the course of the battle.)
So, the Battle of Borodino took place in a completely different way from how (trying to hide the mistakes of our military leaders and, as a result, belittling the glory of the Russian army and people) they describe it. The battle of Borodino did not take place in a chosen and fortified position with only slightly weaker forces on the part of the Russian forces, and the Battle of Borodino, due to the loss of the Shevardinsky redoubt, was taken by the Russians on an open, almost unfortified area with twice the weakest forces against the French, that is, in such conditions, in which it was not only unthinkable to fight for ten hours and make the battle indecisive, but it was unthinkable to keep the army from complete defeat and flight for three hours.

On the morning of the 25th, Pierre left Mozhaisk. On the descent from a huge steep and crooked mountain leading out of the city, past the cathedral on the mountain to the right, in which the service was going on and the evangelism, Pierre got out of the carriage and went on foot. Behind him descended on the mountain some kind of cavalry regiment with singers in front. A train of carts with the wounded in yesterday's case was rising to meet him. The peasant carters, shouting at the horses and whipping them with whips, ran from one side to the other. Carts, on which lay and sat three and four soldiers of the wounded, jumped on the stones, which were thrown in the form of paving stones, on a steep rise. The wounded, tied with rags, pale, with pursed lips and frowned eyebrows, holding on to the beds, jumped and shoved in carts. Everyone looked with almost naive childish curiosity at Pierre's white hat and green tailcoat.
Pierre's coachman angrily shouted at the wounded train to keep them alone. A cavalry regiment with songs, descending from the mountain, advanced on Pierre's droshky and obstructed the road. Pierre stopped, pressing against the edge of the road dug into the mountain. From behind the slope of the mountain, the sun did not reach the deepening of the road; it was cold and damp here; over Pierre's head was a bright August morning, and the ringing bells rang merrily. One cart with the wounded stopped at the edge of the road, near Pierre himself. The driver in bast shoes, out of breath, ran up to his cart, slipped a stone under the rear unshorn wheels and began to straighten the harness on his horse that had become.
One wounded old soldier with his hand tied, walking behind the cart, took hold of it with his good hand and looked back at Pierre.
- Well, compatriot, they will put us here, eh? Ali to Moscow? - he said.
Pierre was so lost in thought that he did not hear the question. He looked first at the cavalry regiment, now meeting with a train of wounded, then at the cart with which he was standing and on which two wounded were sitting and lying alone, and it seemed to him that here, in them, lay the solution to the question that occupied him. One of the soldiers on the cart was probably wounded in the cheek. His whole head was tied with rags, and one cheek swelled like a child's head. His mouth and nose were on the side. This soldier looked at the cathedral and was baptized. Another, a young boy, a recruit, blond and white, as if completely without blood in his thin face, with a stopped, kind smile, looked at Pierre; the third was lying face down, and his face was not visible. Cavalry singers passed over the cart itself.
- Oh, disappeared ... yes the hedgehog's head ...
- Yes, they are tenacious on the other side ... - they made a dancing soldier's song. As if echoing them, but in a different kind of fun, the metallic sounds of pealing were interrupted in the sky. And, in another kind of fun, the hot rays of the sun poured over the top of the opposite slope. But down the slope, beside the cart with the wounded, beside the panting horse with which Pierre stood, it was damp, gloomy and sad.
A soldier with a swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry singers.
- Oh, dapper! He said reproachfully.
- Today, not only a soldier, but also seen peasants! The peasants and those are being driven away, ”said the soldier with a sad smile, who was standing behind the cart and addressing Pierre. - Nowadays they don't understand ... They want to pile on all the people, in one word - Moscow. They want to do one end. - Despite the ambiguity of the soldier's words, Pierre understood everything he wanted to say and nodded his head approvingly.

Theorist of the impact of artifacts as a means of communication. He is best known for his research on the formative impact of electrical and electronic communications on individuals and society (for example, in the concept of a "global village", "absolutely ensuring disagreement on all issues" - McLuhan: Hot & Cool, NY, Signet Books published by The New American Library, Inc., 1967, p. 286.).).

His ideas are important for understanding the development of modern civilization as a global infocommunication society.

Biography

Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton (the capital of Alberta, Canada) into a Methodist family. Marshall was a family name that was used in everyday communication. In Russian sources one can find distortions of McLuhan's surname as "McLuhan", etc.

His parents, Elsie Naomi and Herbert Ernest, were born and have lived their entire lives in Canada. In addition to Marshall, they had another son, Maurice, who was born in 1913. McLuhan's mother was first a teacher at a Baptist school and then an actress. Until the outbreak of World War I, the family lived in Edmonton, where McLuhan's father had a small real estate business. With the outbreak of the war, my father was mobilized into the Canadian army, where he served for about a year. In 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, the capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba.

In 1928, Marshall McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada), where he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1933 and a master's degree in English studies (English studies) in 1934. During his studies, he began to publish small notes in periodicals. So, already in 1930, the first article by McLuhan appeared in the student newspaper of the University of Manitoba entitled "McAlway is this man." An increased interest in English literature prompted him in 1934 to enter Trinity Hall College, Cambridge University (England). There he studied under the guidance of well-known representatives of the new criticism I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. In 1936 he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Cambridge and after returning to North America began teaching at the University of Wisconsin (Madison, USA) as an assistant.

In 1937, Marshall McLuhan converted to Catholicism. From 1937 to 1944 (with a short break in 1939-1940, when he left for Cambridge to get a master's degree) he taught English literature at the Catholic University of St. Louis (St. Louis, USA). There he met Corina Lewis, whom he married in 1939. They had six children.

In December 1943, McLuhan received his Ph.D. with a thesis entitled The Place of Thomas Nash in the Learning of His Time. In 1944, McLuhan returned to Canada, where he taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario from 1944-1946. Moving to Toronto in 1946, he began teaching at St Michael's Catholic College at the University of Toronto. The main achievements of Marshall McLuhan are associated with the University of Toronto. There in 1952 he becomes a professor and publishes most of his books. A significant influence on the direction of McLuhan's scientific research had an acquaintance with a colleague at the university, the Canadian economist Harold Innis (Harold Innis). From 1953-1955 McLuhan was the leader of the seminars on culture and communication, supported by the Ford Foundation. In 1963, he created the Center for Culture and Technology.

The scientific and journalistic activities of Marshall McLuhan, although far from immediately, were widely recognized. In 1964, he became a Fellow of the Royal Scientific Society of Canada, and in 1970, a Knight Commander of the Order of Canada. In 1975, McLuhan was appointed advisor to the Vatican's Social Communication Commission.

In the late 1960s, McLuhan's health began to deteriorate rapidly. In 1967, he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, in 1979 he suffered a heart attack. Marshall McLuhan died on December 31, 1980 in Toronto.

Main works

Marshall McLuhan has written many books and articles, some of them co-authored. Among his major works are The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of an Industrial Man (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Creation of the Typographic Man (1962), Understanding the Means of Communication: The Continuation of Man Outside (1964), The Means of Communication is Massage: List of Consequences (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), War and Peace in the Global Village (1967, co-authored with Quentin Fiore), From Cliché to Archetype (1970, co-authored with Wilfred Watson), The City as classroom "(1977, co-authored with Catherine Hutchon and Eric McLuhan).

Marshall McLuhan's views and lines of research have undergone a major evolution. If at first he is, rather, a literary critic, criticizing modern Western society for manipulating the consciousness of the masses and the decline of interest in the classical cultural heritage, then in the future the nature of his criticism changes in many respects. Since the 1950s, McLuhan has studied modern society and culture, mainly as a product of electrical and electronic communication technologies. It is no coincidence that interest in the work of Marshall McLuhan has skyrocketed with the advent of the Internet of communication theory.

The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of the Industrial Man (1951) Marshall McLuhan's first major work, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of the Industrial Man, has risen to prominence in popular culture research. ["Our century," wrote Marshall McLuhan, "is the first century in which many thousands of well-trained minds devoted themselves entirely to the task of professionally penetrating the collective public consciousness ... with the aim of manipulating, exploiting and controlling it." ] The title of the book, The Mechanical Bride, was taken from a play by the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

Like subsequent works, Marshal McLuhan's first book is written in a mosaic style. It consists of small chapters, which do not need to be read in order. The fact is that, exploring modern society with its electronic communication technologies, McLuhan follows the method they set for constructing their messages (mosaicism is the main form of messages transmitted by infocommunication means). It is no coincidence that on one page of his books one can find reproductions of advertisements, excerpts from newspaper reports, quotes from scientific works, the works of Shakespeare, etc.

"When we deal with information overloads, we are left with nothing but perception according to the principles of stable schematism (pattern)." Marshall McLuen.

In his introduction to the book, McLuhan points out that modern folklore is the product of the intellectual activity of a huge army of professionals: advertising agents, writers, screenwriters, artists, directors, designers, journalists, scientists. All of them use the state of insufficiency, incompleteness, incompleteness of understanding, which is steadily reproduced in the mass consciousness, for the purpose of mass consumption, which is so necessary for the functioning of the modern capitalist economy. In this case, the very form of presenting information acquires particular importance: in the process of perceiving mosaic messages, the audience does not have time for their consistent rational comprehension. McLuen's book reveals hidden impact different types mass communication: advertising, television, cinema, etc.

Each chapter of the book appears as a relatively independent work in which one or another aspect of mass culture is analyzed. One of the chapters, The Mechanical Bride, became the title of the entire book. In it, McLuhan views the understanding of the sphere of sexual relations as a derivative of the use of technology. An example is an ad for Pantyhose On A Pedestal, which shows women’s legs in pantyhose standing on a pedestal: “This is an extremely behavioral view of sex that reduces sexual experience to its mechanical and hygienic aspects. ... In the era of thinking machines, it would be truly amazing if machines for making love were not invented. "

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy won a Canadian Government Prize and made McLuhan's name widely known in the scientific community. In this book, McLuhan answers the question: how communication technologies (mainly writing and printing) affect the organization of cognitive perception and thinking, as well as the ways public organization... In many ways, this work continues the research of Harold Innis. McLuhan notes that Innis “was the first person to accidentally discover the process of change inherent in and accompanying mass communications,” but McLuhan goes beyond Innis in the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Stages of development of culture and society according to Marshall McLuhan - a primitive preliterate culture based on a communal way of life; cultures influenced by writing; a special place is given to the role of the phonetic alphabet; culture formed under the influence of the printed set of I. Gutenberg ("Gutenberg's Galaxy"), the era of the victory of consistency in perception and thinking, individualism according to the type of Aristotle's acting cause, the development of which led to the victory of the capitalist mode of production, the industrial revolution, the principle of centralized hierarchical integration in the state management of the nation state; the modern stage - "electronic society" (the world as a "global village"), under the influence of instantly acting electronic means of communication, leading to the principle of simultaneity in perception and thinking, a multidimensional audio-tactile space.

"Understanding the means of communication: the continuation of a person outside" (1964) McLuhan shows that all objects of human culture (artifacts) act as means of communication (communication and communication), affecting a person and society in and of themselves. Electric light is an elementary means of communication: “Electric light is pure information. It is, so to speak, a means of communication without a message ”(McLuhan M., Understanding the Means of Communication: Human Extension Outward). Electric light allows the use of night time, making the activities of modern society around the clock. Similarly, television, radio, newspapers and other mass media have a huge and still largely unknown impact on the development of society by the very fact of their existence. The essence of his approach was formulated by McLuhan in the famous aphorism "The Medium is the Message".

The medium of communication is "massage": a list of consequences (1967) When the book went on sale, it seemed to many that there was a mistake in the last word of the title, and that the aphorism "The medium is the message" is the real title of the book. ... However, due to the change of one letter in the word "massage", at least two new meanings appeared: "a means of communication as massage", that is, as something massaging a person, gradually changing his forms of perception, and "a means of communication as an age of the masses" (Mass Age). The book is the result of McLuhan's collaboration with designer and photographer Quentin Fiore, who used collage and photographs to frame McLuhan's aphorisms and main ideas.

The book Laws of Media, published after the death of Marshall McLuhan (1988) by his son Eric McLuhan, is about understanding the basic forms of communication.

Influence of Marshall McLuhan's ideas

Note the many speeches and interviews of Marshall McLuhan, which can be easily found, for example, on YouTube; reprints of his books; the term "McLuenism", which appeared in French to denote the forms of culture that have developed under the influence of electronic means of communication; his name included in the prestigious reference almanac Information Please Almanac as one of the most distinguished people in the history of mankind.

In McLuhan's "piggy bank" can be added popularity among artists, sculptors, architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, curators of museums, school and university teachers, cinematographers, television producers, specialists in manipulating public opinion, newspaper reporters, and poets who have mastered the infocommunication society. A well-known representative of aleatoric (that is, created and performed on a random basis) John Cage expressed his gratitude to McLuhan.

At first, the representatives of the literary establishment who fiercely criticized him over time began to increasingly discover that McLuhan, in fact, supplements and improves their own ideas about the role of infocommunications. He not only began to be called the author of "the most radical and most developed theory of communication" (Czitron D., Media and the American Mind. From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill, 1982, p. 147), but also to publish articles about him as one of the greatest thinkers (see, for example, Thinkers of the Twentieth Century. L., 1984). Marshall McLuhan's ideas have firmly entered the theoretical arsenal of researchers in the infocommunication society.

There are also many followers of McLuhan's ideas in fiction (including among the representatives of cyberpunk).

The boom of McLuhan's ideas in the West in connection with the global infocommunication revolution should not be surprising, bearing in mind how fruitfully he worked in this area. The main ideas of Marshall McLuhan for many today have become self-evident, and a person who knows his work well, it is not difficult to see their multifaceted influence in relation to everyday life, science, culture, philosophy, popular culture, politics, education, advertising, cinema (and not only where it is easiest to see: see, for example, Cronenberg, David, Videodrome and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), in which Marshall McLuhan played himself).

Now, Internet search engines, in response to a query about Marshall McLuhan, offer a lot of scientific studies that use his theoretical developments. Through the same Internet, several international projects are being implemented, in the center of which are McLuhan's ideas about the formative role of infocommunication means. The network of the Media Ecology Association (U.S.A.) McLuhan List has been operating on the Internet for many years, bringing together researchers of the problems of the global infocommunication society from different countries from day to day. In this network, in particular, the son of Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, is fruitfully working.

Marshall McLuhan, along with Harold Innis, is sometimes inappropriately regarded as the founder of "media theory" in the sociology of mass communications. Marshall McLuhan himself not only never considered himself a sociologist, but also distanced himself from sociology as, in principle, an outdated "specialty". Recall that for American sociologists, with their structural-functionalist imperative, the electronic youth revolution in America and the events associated with it turned out to be unexpected, while for Marshall McLuhan these were things taken for granted, for example, in connection with entering the big life " the first generation of television, "grown-up American boys and girls who have absorbed ways of understanding life" with their mother's television viewer. "

Under the influence of Marshall McLuhan, the views of Z. Brzezinski were formed.

In philosophy, McLuhan's ideas are often associated with postmodernism. McLuhan himself has shown his fundamental differences with this approach.

In the USSR, the views of Marshall McLuhan have been analyzed since the 60s in the works of E. Arab-ogly, V. Averyanov, R. Boretsky, A. Volkov, N. Vasilenko, N. Golyadkin, G. Grigoryan, P. Gurevich, Yu. Davydov , Y. Kagramanova, E. Kartseva, I. Kravchenko, A. Kovaleva, R. Kopylova, V. Korobeinikova, V. Lyndin, A. Midler, S. Moznyagun, V. Skiba, V. Terina, M. Turovskoy, O Feofanov, B. Firsov, V. Tsarev and others.

In 1977-1978, the INION (Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences) of the USSR Academy of Sciences published an analytical abstract collection "The ideological function of technocratic concepts of propaganda" in two volumes, which examined in detail the theoretical views of Marshall McLuhan and the mostly inadequate response to them in the countries West (mainly in the USA). The collection was published with the stamp "For official use", that is, it was focused mainly on employees of research institutes. If the stamp of the collection has become an anachronism, then its circulation (500 copies) for the Russian Federation looks quite modern.

Starting with this collection, whose scientific editors did not know English well and, as they were supposed to, considered themselves the main authors, the spelling of the name "McLuhan" as "McLuhan" spread (if this spelling is correct, then it is correct to write "luna").

Translations of Marshall McLuhan's works into Russian are difficult. The unsatisfactory quality of a number of translations is largely due to the fact that McLuhan's theoretical developments, despite all their importance for understanding modern society, still remain on the periphery of the interests of the Russian scientific community.

Some sayings about Marshall McLuhan

• Writer and publicist Tom Wolfe has suggested that McLuhan is perhaps the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.
• Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who met with McLuhan, said: "I think he had a genius intuition."
• The researcher of global infocommunications Manuel Castells assigned McLuhan the place of "the great visionary who ... revolutionized the understanding of perception and thinking in the field of communications."

Movies about Marshall McLuhan

• McLuhan's Wake, dir. Kevin McMahon
• Marshall McLuhan's ABC, dir. David Soubelman
• Research McLuhan (The McLuhan Probes) dir. David Soubelman
• Out Of Orbit dir. Carl Besse

• The Oxford English Dictionary contains 346 references to McLuhan.
• In 1989, that is, nine years after his death, the book "Global Village" was published (co-authored with Bruce Powers).
• In 1995, an e-mail "interview" with McLuhan was published in the magazine

  Notes (edit)

  Literature

  In English

  • McLuhan M., The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. - N.Y .: The Vanguard Press, 1951.
  • McLuhan M., The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. - Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962.
  • McLuhan M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. - N.Y .: McGraw Hill, 1964.
  • McLuhan M., Fiore Q. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. - N.Y .: Random House, 1967.
  • McLuhan M., Fiore Q. War and Peace in the Global Village. - N.Y .: Bantam, 1968.
  • McLuhan M., Parker H. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. - N.Y .: Harper & Row, 1968.
  • McLuhan M., Culture is Our Business. - N.Y .: McGraw Hill, 1970.
  • McLuhan M., Watson W. From Cliche to Archetype. - N.Y .: Viking, 1970.
  • McLuhan M., Hutchon K., McLuhan E. - City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. The Book Society of Canada Limited, 1977.

  In Russian

  • McLuhan, M., Gutenberg's Galaxy: The Becoming of a Man of Printing (correct translation: Gutenberg's Galaxy). - M .: Fund "Mir", Academic Project, 2005.
  • McLuhan M., Understanding media: external extensions of a person (correct translation: Understanding the means of communication: extensions of a person outside). - M .: Canon-Press / Kuchkovo field, 2003.
  • McLuhan M. Press: Information Leak Management
  • McLuhan M., With the advent of Sputnik, the planet has become a global theater in which there are no spectators, but only actors. "Per. V. P. Terin // Centaur, M., 1994, No. 1. http: //pechali.narod. ru / masskomm1.txt http://old.mgimo.ru/kf/MEDIA/msarticl/index.htm
  • McLuhan M., Television. A timid giant. Per .: V.P. Terin. // Television "87, M., Publishing house" Ikusstvo "; http://pechali.narod.ru/masskomm2.txt

  Bibliography

  In English

  • Gordon T.W. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. - Toronto: Basic Books, 1997.
  • Levinson P. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. - N.Y .: Routledge, 1999.
  • Marchand P. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. - Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
  • Meyrowitz J. Medium Theory // Communication Theory Today / Ed. by David Crowley and David Mitchell. - Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
  • Miller J. Marshall McLuhan. - N.Y .: Viking Press, 1971.

  In Russian

  • Wolfe G., The Wisdom of St. Marshall, the Holy Fool // Russian Journal. 2001.19 April.
  • Gakov V., Knight of the media image // Kommersant-Dengi. 2001. No. 28. July 18.
  • Zasursky I., Continuation of a man // Nezavisimaya gazeta. 2004.17 September.
  • Kozlova N. N., Criticism of the concept of "mass culture" by Marshall McLuhan. Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. degree of candidate of philosophical sciences. - M .: Publishing house of Moscow University, 1976.
  • Kozlova N., McLuhan: the contexts of myth // Pushkin. 1998. No. 5 (11). July 1.
  • Madison A., Marshall McLuhan and information wars // SMI.ru. 2000.14 January
  • Nikolaev V., Herbert Marshall McLuhan and his book "Understanding the Means of Communication" // Otechestvennye zapiski. 2003. No. 4.
  • Terin V.P., Mass communication. Study of the experience of the West. Second edition, revised and enlarged. M., 2000.
  • Whitzel M. The Man Who Seen the Future // Elitarium, www.elitarium.ru
  • Tsarev V. Yu. Socio-cultural foundations of "McLuenism". Abstract of thesis. dis. to apply for an account. degree of candidate of philosophical sciences. - M., 1989.