As the best-known commentator on communications media, Marshall McLuhan has given more than his fair share of phrases to the language. "The global village", "the medium is the message" and the distinction between "hot" media like print and "cool" media like radio have all entered the vocabulary of our times.
Like any widely quoted phrases, they have taken on lives of their own, separate from the context where they were first proposed. And like any such fragments they are as often misunderstood and misapplied as they are used correctly. The "global village" created by television is self-explanatory enough to have survived intact down the decades, but many of McLuhan's other insights have been battered and bruised in usage.
This is partly McLuhan's own fault. His pioneering ideas were widely read and taken up in part because they were couched in metaphors, aphorisms and very readable essays. In some cases the metaphor was capable of obscuring as much as it elucidated and when he was called upon to explain something more clearly, his typical response was that his interest was exploration, no explanation.
Sensibly then, Paul Levinson revisits and expands on McLuhan's key ideas before bringing them forward for application to the digital age. Each of the main 13 chapters of the book takes one of McLuhan's concepts as a theme for this treatment. The process is firmly grounded in the original work, but this book is as much Levinson as McLuhan in the end of the day.
It is easy to recall a first meeting with McLuhan's work. The sometimes playful style, the distrust of academic orthodoxies and the shock of new insight into the media that surround us made that first reading memorable.
McLuhan's most important publications were in the 1960s and many of his ideas concerned the rise of television. As Levinson puts it: "Those insights showed us a world of media in motion, in which television was triumphing over books, newspapers, radio and motion pictures for crucial segments of our attention, and consequently was exerting profound influence on politics, business, entertainment, education and the general conduct of our lives.
"This Bayeux Tapestry of media in competition for our patronage - for our souls according to some - quite naturally led McLuhan to consider the ways that media differed in their engagement of our mentalities."
Does this sound familiar? Media are once again in motion, with the Internet shaking up just the same areas listed by Levinson above. McLuhan always saw media in relation to their precursors and successors, so his theories leave plenty of scope for extension to the Internet.
This work of extension was not an option for McLuhan himself, who died on the last day of 1980, just before the rise of online networks became a mass movement. Levinson, who met and worked with McLuhan in the late 1970s writes that "The handwriting for coming to terms with out digital age was on the wall of McLuhan's books." It is a claim that he largely substantiates in the book.
"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's best-known catchphrase, and the key to his view of media. Essentially, it means that our use of a medium has a greater impact on us than the content carried by that medium. "The act of talking on the phone has been more revolutionary in human affairs than most things said on the phone," as Levinson puts it.
Levinson goes on to point out that the Internet recycles content of prior media. "Part of the `message' of the medium of the Internet is all or at least most media that have come before it, with writing ubiquitous in the driving seat." This has changed the nature of reading and writing in many ways, not least that "the Internet and its tributaries reverse the trajectory of a handful of messages to a legion of passive users that has typified all technological media since the printing press.
"We might say that not only are prior media the content of the Internet, but so too is the human user who, unlike the consumer of other mass media, creates content online with almost every use. In other words, the user is the content of the Internet - which, it turns out, is much what McLuhan went on to say, in a metaphoric sense, about media in general."
Levinson carries this idea forward through consideration of "discarnate man" - the disembodied communicator over electronic media who McLuhan wrote "has a very weak awareness of private identity, and has been relieved of all commitments to law and morals" - and most of McLuhan's other major precepts.
These include the decentralising effect of media, the declining role of "gatekeepers" of the media and McLuhan's 1960 assertion that "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." At each stage McLuhan's ideas offer insights into the nature, role and effect of the Internet phenomenon that he did not live to see for himself. In many cases Levinson needs to make some adjustments, to move the focus or update the analogy, but it is amazing how much of McLuhan's thinking is directly relevant.
In prose style, Levinson is no McLuhan. The style is at times almost as heavyweight as the thinking, and the frequency of scholarly references can be irritating. (The reader can't help yearning to read it in hypertext, where the reference could be concealed behind hyperlinks.)
Despite these minor reservations, this is an extremely useful and thought-provoking book. It could not be further from the gold-rush atmosphere in which the Net is most often discussed, and it's all the better for that.
Digital McLuhan, A guide to the information millennium, by Paul Levinson, is published by Routledge. No price given.
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie