BACK PAGES:MEDIA GURU Marshall McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase "global village" and identifying the idea that "the medium is the message" in one easily-remembered phrase.
In Dublin in 1972 to deliver a lecture at the RDS, he kicked off with a press conference on which Dick Grogan wrote this report:
Marshall McLuhan refuses to say whether he is a prophet of doom or deliverance, but last night he sat in Dublin alongside an assortment of advertising agency executives and said: “The consumer age is already over.”
That demanded, perhaps, detachment rather than courage. Or maybe it merely demanded awareness, or self-confidence. I don’t know. I only know I was there . . . sitting in a room of the Arrow Advertising agency with an orange sign, appropriately facing into the room and stating “Meeting in Progress”, McLuhan told a few pressmen: “I think of the media as being the big oppressors of our time.”
He repeated, in a half-dozen ways, the aphorism that made him famous: “The media is the message . . . the user is the content of every poem or piece of writing . . . the user is always the content of the message . . . the content of any media is the user.”
Anti-consumerism, he told the gathering, is raging all over the globe. The top executives in the US are dropping out. The anti-consumer is the drop-out.
What would take the place of consumerism? “Role-playing and do-it-yourself.” . . .
The question, he said, was: “Is advertising content or is it total environment?”
The adman’s slogan . . . was: “Love thy label as thyself.”
Nobody ever looked at an icebox (refrigerator) advertisement, he said, unless he had the same icebox. “He wants to know: ‘What sort of satisfaction am I supposed to be getting out of this thing’?”
TV was not a consumer medium. “It turns people into commercial role-playing hijackers,” he declared. And the newspaper was artefact: “If you want to magnify the slightest event in the community, you just cover it.” Radio, however, was the “hot, exasperating medium that drives people like the Irish up the wall” (shades of Liam Nolan).
Representative government, he continued, could not stand up to TV culture. This had been demonstrated in the US. It had nothing to do with politics – it had to do with people and images.
[Canadian prime minister] Pierre Trudeau was the only man he knew who could “take” TV.
“He happens to have a tribal face,” said Prof McLuhan. “TV cannot take a private face – it just scrubs it out.” In Ireland we might well have people with real tribal faces. They could take TV.
The American negro, he asserted, was being betrayed by TV. “He’s being pushed up in to a huge position of importance, which he’s not prepared for. There’s going to be a bloodbath,” said the media analyst. “Negritude has come into America.”
He thought that people would eventually discover that the media were huge world diseases – like bubonic plague – that had destroyed man over and over again. They had wiped out cultures, he declared. With the disappearance of consumerism, he predicted, there would be an enormous revival of local cultures – decentralised forms.
Wrenched back to the Northern Ireland situation, he commented: “There you have a lost culture.”
There were more car deaths than political deaths in Northern Ireland, he said, but the media did not cover the car deaths.
He declared that various people, including Karl Marx and Plato, had no theory of communication. But St Paul had.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1972/0701/Pg008.html#Ar00801