The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Tom Wolfe on Marshall McLuhan for His 100th Would-Be Birthday

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of iconic media theorist Marshall McLuhan, one of my great heroes and a Brain Pickings repeat offender. Marshall McLuhan Speaks is a fantastic, beautifully designed site commemorating the centennial with a treasure trove of McLuhan video appearances and interviews. Chief among them is this excellent biographical segment by equally iconic writer Tom Wolfe from 1984, produced and directed by Marshall’s daughter, Stephanie McLuhan-Ortved. (With bonus points for the Woody Allen cameo in the beginning, where you might also recognize the origin of the title of Douglas Coupland’s must-read McLuhan almost-biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!.)

The segment was eventually adapted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, edited by McLuhan’s daughter and with a foreword by Wolfe offering a 21st-century perspective on McLuhan’s life and work.

Today, on the eve of the 21st century, with hot speculation about the coming digital civilization, in which all humanity will be wired up and online so that geographic locations and national boundaries, or so it’s predicted, will become irrelevant, McLuhan is very much in the center of the screen again, nearly two decades after his death, this time as the first seer of cyberspace.” ~ Tom Wolfe

Wolfe, of course, is best known in relation to McLuhan by way of his 1965 essay, “What If He’s Right?”. (“Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov… What if he is right?”)

For the ultimate lens on McLuhan’s thought and legacy, I can’t recommend Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! enough — a compelling celebration of what I consider to be McLuhan’s greatest talent: his penchant for pattern-recognition and cross-disciplinary dot-connecting.


Published July 21, 2011

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/07/21/tom-wolfe-on-marshall-mcluhan/

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