Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: You're in the right place and it's the right time. This is the Executive Dropout podcast. I'm Jacob Sager. Thank you so much for listening. Let's get this episode started.
Howdy. I'm Jacob Sager and today I'm joined with by Tom Cooper.
I'm in Austin, Texas, and Tom Cooper is speaking to me from Hawaii.
And I see a beautiful background behind you, beautiful blue sky.
I must be nice this time of year, all year round out there, huh?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: It is not overrated. It is overpriced, but it is not overrated.
You know those week long forecasts that you see on TV that jump up and down here, it'll be like 70, 72, 74, 71, 80 for the whole week, almost every week. So we're very fortunate.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Oh, that's, that's really lovely.
So the, one of the big things, I mean, the main thing we're here to talk about today is of the many things that you're up to right now is you've, you've recently put out a book, a history on Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innes. And towards the end of the book, you asked the question that, you know, everyone asks, it's a very important one, which is, you know, are they right?
Is the shared body of work or assumptions or big things that they put out there, are those, have they been validated or were they correct in what they were saying?
And in your book you give an interesting start to your answer and how you unfold this, which is to talk about a play within a play, which I think is one of my favorite ideas. I'm drawn to McLuhan as an English major.
And that's what really turns me on to media studies and media theory is things like the play within a play in Hamlet or in our family. We used to always love the Jack Handys from Saturday Night Live, and he had one once that was. If you realize that what you're watching is a play within a play, hold on, because you're in for the ride of your life. And I think the analogy and the way that you unpack it in your book is really apt. So I wanted to start there if you could, I mean, share with our audience.
There's so much richness in the book and this is kind of a big thought towards the end there, but why you use that analogy and what it means.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks very much and I'm delighted to be with you. And a play within a play also pertains to man of La Mancha, which I've just recently seen, and people have probably seen other plays within a play. Hamlet is the most famous, where the play is the thing that I'll catch, the conscience of the king. But we also know there are stories within a story and book within a book and movies within a movie. And the big idea there is that something may be true at one level, but then you hop to a larger level and realize that it may be false or it may be seen in a different light from that higher level. So in the case of McLuhan and Inness, they were big on the idea, and I'm going to overly reduce it to just a few words that implements of communication for Innis, which McLuhan dubbed the media, basically are the cause of cultural change, the cause of thought change within our heads, the cause of much interaction among cultures and the cause of empires and civilizations and so forth. And that was drastically different than, say, Freud and Jung, who thought that the subconscious was the motivation for change and for personal behavior are Marx and Engels, who thought class struggle or economics, materialism was at the base of historical change and so forth. So when you look at that big idea, the medium is the message or the implement of communication is the turning point. However you want to phrase that, that is a story inside of a larger story, and it has a lot of teeth. Because when you have man bites media, that's really an important story that the news wants to cover.
When you have media bites man, that's a different story.
If you have dog bites media, which is the cliche that we've heard many times, or dog bites man, that's nothing. You know, people already know that dogs bite human beings all the time.
But when a human being bites the dog, we begin to wonder what's going on with that human being. And so it was when Innocent McLuhan no longer said, man creates media.
In other words, we're the author and we're the source, but the media recreates man.
That was a headline that was huge. That was a different way of seeing it that caught worldwide attention, especially for McLuhan, who popularized, if you will, our made available Innis's thinking.
So that was a huge story.
But the story that they both believed, innocent McLuhan that we're inside of when we hear that story, a larger 1. For McLuhan, God created media. He was a devout Catholic, and the universe, therefore created man and media and so forth, depending on your vision of God. And for Innes, geography created media change.
He studied the whole history of Canada, book by book. Volume by volume, long nights in the archives. A lot of detailed empiricism to come up with the fact that it was the location of the rivers that determined where the beavers would populate, which in turn determined where those who were capturing the beavers would populate, which in turn meant cities were built there and that supplies were needed there, and that geography ultimately was the cause of everything. If you're going to give a primary factor, he had other factors, and McLuhan had other factors. But on the whole, that's outside of technology. Geography is outside of technology. And so is the notion of God or divinity or cosmic cause. And so for both of them, they're not telling you what their outer story is. They're only telling you the part where you think the puppets are doing everything. They don't tell you who the puppeteer is for them.
And the puppets seem to be kicking each other and causing all kinds of change, but the puppeteer is actually their master and what they believe in. So a story within a story, it's true, but you have to look at the outer story to understand both men and also understand change.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: It's an interesting book that you wrote about their relationship and the impact of inness on McLuhan and even of McLuhan on inness.
And I want to talk a bit in terms of, like, the 50s versus the 60s versus the 70s, in terms.
He passed. He died in the mid-50s.
Lewin was publishing books around that time as well, in the 50s, and started publishing his theories then, but was publishing through the 60s as well.
And for students of some of the longer works of McLuhan, such as Understanding Media, he references Innis a lot.
Honestly, I have not read Gutenberg Galaxy in full, but I feel he.
I'm curious what the relationship was between the men in their work.
How that.
Well, specifically, you know, I mean, why. How they related to each other while they were alive and how that affected the. The. What they were writing then. I'm curious about how that evolved afterwards, after Innis's death and further on.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yes. Let's look at it through the decades. I will step back just a little, but I'll emphasize the decades you mentioned. So way back as early as the 20s and 30s, they almost met each other. They were on a collision course, so to speak. And by the 40s, they had communicated with each other about McLuhan getting a grant and so forth. So you can kind of see something coming. It's the late 40s where they're both on the same campus, the University of Toronto, where the childhood best friend of McLuhan, Tom Easterbrook, is also on Ennis's faculty.
So he wants to introduce them. And when he does, it's a horrible encounter because Easterbrook is hoping, wow, they both have something in common, but in fact, they talk about something they don't have in common. Religion. And Innes was a devout agnostic at that point. He had seen the war. He had been in World War I. He was soured on any belief in God whatsoever. And McLuhan was a zealous convert. He. He was not a hereditary Catholic. He was someone who had just fallen in love with Catholicism. So it looked like their path was going to end right there. But in the late 40s, there was something called the Values Group, where a number of handpicked professors at the University of Toronto came together and talked about values. And Innes, the economist, had stumbled upon communication tools as the part of the economy that people didn't really study and needed to know about and was increasingly of the mind that technologies of communication actually fostered economies and changed culture and civilization. And McLuhan got to hear that talk within the Values group. And then McLuhan started talking about the.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: But a pretty radical thing at the time. Or was. Was that kind of a, you know, his own synthesis that wasn't necessarily a huge departure?
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it was radical in the sense that even many of his own economist friends said, no, no, stay to Vermeer turf. Stay within the discipline. You're getting into hot water here, and you no longer have the time. He was dying of cancer. You no longer have the time to substantiate all your thought. It's pretty much in his last books, almost theory, and in some ways it's almost gobbledygook to someone who isn't a disciplined scholar, because he knew he was running out of time, and he compressed it. He didn't take the time to footnote it and all of that.
McLuhan, on the other hand, had fallen in love with the English language and with the masters of the English language. Had written a masters about Meredith and a doctorate about Nash, but spent as much time on Eliot and Hopkins and many of the other leading writers of his day and preceding his day. And so he was interested in the new poetry of advertising, and he saw that some of the best minds and clever wordplay and so forth were devoted to ads. And he wrote an entire book on that. And that approach to communication was, you might say, from the right side, while McLuhan, while Ennis was from the left side. And they collided with two different views. But they got to hear each other both speak at this values group.
And Innes was so impressed, he gave copies of McLuhan's book about advertising.
And now we're talking about the early 50s, as a Christmas gift to many members of his family and others.
And you may know that book as the Mechanical Bride.
And that was what kicked McLuhan into public awareness. Not nearly as much as what you cited. Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy certainly took him much further. But in the early 50s, Inness was aware of that book, and McLuhan was certainly aware of everything that Innes was writing at that point. He was not just fascinated by one talk or whatever, but he began to write him and even proposed, maybe we should start a school.
And you can interpret that as a school of thought, or you can interpret that since Innis was a dean, as a department or however you want to.
But it never got developed because innis died in 1952.
And so they had this possible promise of a new discipline. And it did become a discipline.
And McLuhan asked Innis to contribute to his newsletter that was going to be about communication. And Innis said, this is interesting. I want to circulate your thinking to my colleagues. And Innes did end up in writing in this new newsletter that happened, although posthumously, and from there on out, Once ennis passed away, McLuhan felt a kind of deep commitment to develop that thinking, but to do it using the English prose, the literary devices that he had developed and borrowed.
And as you know, in the field of English literature, people borrow generously from Shakespeare and everyone else. And so he began to borrow all the literary devices that he had to some degree mastered and certainly to a large degree studied from the grand greats. And Chesterton was one of his models for this. And Chesterton was also a turning point in his religious conversion. But as he looked at these literary devices, he began to think, you know, why call a spade a spade?
Everybody knows a spade is a spade. Inness is convinced that you have to call a spade a spade. But McLuhan would say, and I'm speaking metaphorically here, why not call a spade spade a blade? Because people will pick up their ears and listen if you call a spade a spade. It's trivial, it's trite. Everyone knows that. So McLuhan would find all of these ways to make something more imaginative, creative, shocking.
And that caused many people to wonder if he was literally true, because he would use metaphor, he would use analogy, he would use inverted, cliches, he would turn a phrase at 80 miles an hour. And many people were attracted to that because he seemed like a new poet. But others were totally repelled because he called himself a scholar. And this did not seem like scholarship. So that's the late 50s where McLuhan is beginning to develop. And then in the 60s, he is becoming a popular figure. He appears in a Woody Allen movie, he begins to be quoted on the TV show Laugh in, and lots of people are passing around his phrases without really knowing what they mean. And at that time, he gets awarded a major award for his book the Gutenberg Galaxy, because it does seem sufficiently scholarly, it does seem sufficiently provocative, and it does seem sufficiently inisian to those who knew Innes to be taken very seriously. A lot of his later books after that do continue to look at other media that are coming into the fore. Innes did not see those media. He heard radio, but he barely saw television. Toward the end of his life, he certainly didn't know a lot about the computer. It was just a model at that point. It was not applied, and McLuhan did. McLuhan began to talk about all these other technologies, which for us are a bit old hat now, but in his day, were provocative, were current, were of interest to a large public.
And so he would go to the NPR crowd, as I call it, the PBS kind of crowd of intellectuals. But soon he got outside of that circle as well. And that was huge for a scholar, Ennis Day. And meanwhile, Ennis was credited by McLuhan again and again in writing. He'd say, you know, this book is just a footnote to the work of Harold Dennis. So he certainly acknowledged him. But that acknowledgment stayed only in scholarly circles. People didn't have a clue who Harold Dennis was when they would hear McLuhan give a talk. And certainly when he became a soundbite. McLuhan often became just a word or a phrase. You know, someone would say, that's McLuhanistic, or they'd say, the medium is the message. Without really knowing what it was, it became a bit of a cliche.
Innis was way in the background by that time. He was not a public figure. He shunned being colorful. He didn't like the young professors who were full of hyperbole, trying to get promoted. And so he didn't like that side of McLuhan, all the fancy talk, as he would have called it. But he did fall in love with McLuhan's perceptions of how the media really work.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: I'm Curious if Innes says that geography is a major driver.
And from both of them we talk about the landscape of tools or media form and how that kind of is shaping what's coming out of it.
I'm curious to know what Toronto and the academic scene and media scene, in the art scene was like through the 50s and 60s kind of city. Was that like. I mean, it, you know, I mean university city, but tell me, tell me more about that. I've never actually been.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah, there are many, many dimensions to the answer to that.
Toronto was a Native American where two different tribes had two different meanings for it.
But it was in one of those meanings, the meeting place. So Toronto was a place where many cultures and many groups had met and had indigenous roots and yet had a lot of English influence, some French influence, so forth and so on. Toronto was also a place where, if you look back, there were a number of leading intellectuals in different fields and authors in different fields. Northrop Fry was there. I don't know how many of these names will resonate now, but in their day, Emil Fkenheim was there.
Harold Bloom was a visiting scholar there at the time.
Many, many others. Robertson Davies, the great Canadian playwright and author.
And there were others who lived in Toronto who weren't part of the University of Toronto. Claude Bissell was the president at that time. He was a famous general before that. So you had a lot of colorful characters interacting around Toronto and you could almost call it a Toronto circle the way there was a Vienna circle, but not with the same depth because the only time they all came together was that values group discussion, which was a series of one night lectures by different people who participated.
But in its day, University of Toronto, and it's still a very strong intellectual presence, but in its day, at that time, it was a fertile crescent for the birth of new ideas.
And Innes became a dean. So he had a lot of power and he could push in almost any direction he wanted to to do research.
And he'd go to the Toronto archives, but also up to Ottawa to those archives. And before that he had pillaged the entire landscape, traveling by canoe and so forth and so on to study the beaver trade, the cod trade, the timber trade. And it was the timber trade that led him into studying communication, because you couldn't study it the way you studied the and cod trade before and the railway before, which were his major books. But suddenly when you're looking at timber and you see that the largest product is something like paper and books and magazines, you're suddenly in the world of ideas.
You're no longer just considering a product or a resource, but you have to then begin to encounter these impact that paper has on consciousness, not just on the economy.
And that made him very interesting to McLuhan because he was beginning to say, so what about the content that's carried by the medium? Does the medium transform that content? Is the medium the most important part of it? And Inness did begin to say, yes, it has a bias towards space or time, that if the medium is like clay tablets or stone, it has a kind of eternal quality. It can preserve tradition and so forth and so on. But if it's more like paper, parchment and papyrus and all the things that could be duplicated long before the world of Xerox, then a king could send out the same message, which he couldn't do with stone tablets, to all of his field generals and begin to have a uniformity of thought and culture presented, and an empire could develop by virtue of this bias towards space spreading in space.
So all of that was very attractive. And I think Toronto was a place where more interdisciplinary work could be done because you had a number of leaders of thought in that area and others who agreed within us that you need to step outside of your safe zone and begin to explore. And that's the very word that McLuhan picked up on. I mean, to explore, not explain became his catchphrase.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: So you. You became a student in Toronto as well, right? That.
Is that where you. You came and you were a teaching Assistant for Marshall McLuhan.
When did you.
What was going on in your academic and personal career that you were making those choices?
You were pursuing a master's degree or your PhD up there, is that correct?
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Both of them. I had a dual interest in theater and communication.
And as a Harvard undergrad in Cambridge, I was putting together the first major that they had in communication. I'm sure there were others who were trying to do it, and I'm not. I don't mean that as an ego trip.
There were undergrads exploring different kinds of what were called special concentrations. But to my knowledge, I was the first who wanted to do that. And that meant putting together a patchwork quilt of courses, everything from insect communication to some of the first courses on computers.
This is back in. In 68 to 73 when I was there. So I had to put those together. And I kept bumping up against the name McLuhan, you know, when I talked to professors about, so can I take your course in perceptual psychology? Because it pertains well have you read the book by McLuhan? And many of them were debate phase about whether McLuhan was genius or gibberish.
The Harump, Harrump. Traditional scholars pretty much saw him as, you know, hey, he doesn't footnote his work. He's not logical. He's often analogical.
I'm going to discount him as a serious thinker. But others were saying, wait a minute, he makes you think, and that's the whole point of the university.
And he makes you rethink, and then he'll come at it from another angle, makes you think again.
And he's exploring, you know, kind of untested territory.
And if you go out and step on breaking ice, you're at risk. But also, you may be the first one to make it to the other side, where nobody knows what's on the. And he was kind of in that land. So I got grants from both the University of Toronto, Canada, and from Harvard to go and write and find out If Ennis and McLuhan was. Were genius or gibberish. That's where that phrase came from. And I put that in the. In the grants and so forth.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: This was. This was 72 that you were getting those grants or the early 70s.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: That's right. 73 is the year that I graduated and also the year that I entered University of Toronto with those grants in hand and with the expectation that I would write my master's about genius or gibberish. And my master's, I was also in the School of Drama there. So my master's had a lot to do with theater. But I would be constantly applying McLuhan. And by the time I got to my doctorate, it was about Ennis and McLuhan and their relationship, but not nearly as much information as I have in the book, because, first of all, I completed my doctorate in 79, and it was unanimously approved. So I felt good about that. So I kind of said, well, if I.
Maybe I can make a book out of it someday, but I'm going to put it on the shelf for now because I have to go become a professor and do all these other things. Publish or perish tenure.
And I also still loved the arts, theater and music. I'm a union musician. And so it kind of got put on the shelf. Although I'd publish an article here about McLuhan or another one about Ennis. And as soon as I retired, I. I said I must finally do what many people encourage me to do, and that is not publish the thesis per se, but update it, upgrade it reread it, critique it, find the nuggets of importance within it, but then build around those. And also consider all of Innocent McLuhan's champions and critics, because there is some reasonable criticism of both men. And there are also some great champions of both who have gone on to establish their own literary career and so forth. And so a lot of the book deals with not only are they right and what is their thinking, but applying them to the world of AI and social media and all that we have now, as well as considering their champions and their critics.
Ultimately, is there an answer to the question, are they right?
[00:27:09] Speaker B: You were in, when you came to Toronto as a graduate and PhD student, you worked directly with Marshall, and he was electoring at the time, or by the early mid-70s, he was already.
That's around the time what Take Today might have come out around that time.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. With Barrington Nevitt, who was alive and very much a presence in his seminars. His seminars were open to virtually everyone. So you'd have groupies and curiosity seekers and students and faculty and all kinds of people in the open Monday night seminars. And Barry Nevitt, who wrote Take Today, was there with him. Claude Bissell, the president. But he'd bring in the Bucky Fullers of the world and others who were also provocative in their thought and who often agreed on are, disagreed with him. Malcolm Muggeridge disagreed with almost everything he said, the great English scholar, but also loved to be with him. So seeing those two in the classroom, Sirvon Schreiber, many others, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the father of the recent prime minister, was prime minister at the time. He'd have conversations.
So we were very fortunate to see a lot of dialectical thought, you might say, people with different ideas bouncing off of him and how he would handle that. But yes, he also had private classes, like every other professor, where people couldn't sit in unless they were invited or they paid to audit the class. And so I got to be with him in those smaller settings as well. Some of those were in the English department. He taught English, and he had been teaching English long before he taught media, but some were under the realm of cnt, Culture and Technology. That was the name of his center. And so there were other courses that had a flavor of media dominance as the topic du jour, and others that seemed to be about Joyce, and he was a great Joycean or Elliot or other leading English scholars. And yet they all led to the same place.
And that place was you'd get back from your paper instead of a grade like a B or C, you'd get a zero or a one or a two. And what that meant was, tom, you've had one new idea in this whole bloody paper, you know, or two. If you got a two, you felt really good. A lot of people got zeros. And they thought the first time they saw that, geez, out of 100, I got a zero. What did I do wrong? So no matter whether it was called an English class or whether it was called Culture and Technology, you did not want to get a zero. And you wanted to be thinking new ideas that seem new to Marshall, which is pretty hard to do. But he would often credit you with ideas that seemed to be new to you once he got to know you, rather than just new to the world itself and his world, which was comprehensive.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: What were. What were some of the English classes? Were they. Was it like, just like all a Joyce, or would it be a survey over a couple authors?
I'm curious with some of those. One of those. Some of those course offerings might have been.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I actually list those in the back of the book because I took notes in his classes and so forth.
But he loved the Elizabethans and so. And, you know, he knew Nash inside out, so. So a lot of those would creep in.
Eliot was a favorite topic, certainly. Joyce was an entire universe for him, and he talked about that. Finnegan's Wake was one universe, Ulysses was another, because you had multiple meanings in Joyce. So I remember very clearly him taking the song by Robert Burns, when a body meets a body coming through the rye. Joyce had changed that to gin a body b a y d y mead a body b a y d y comin C o m I n through the rye.
And McLuhan calling it Joyce doing wine, women and song in that very limited phrase, because you have gin, mead, m e a d and rye R y e all alcohol.
And then you have body, body and comin as in coming someone's, you know, sexually coming, all of it as a song. You have wine, women and songs. So that's the way McLuhan would teach. He would go in and perform exegesis on Joyce, finding hidden levels and layers.
And then he would find ways to apply that to the current world. And that's what he did in his writing as well. He would unusually and atypically juxtapose Homer and the Beatles, for example, as. As the auditory culture of their day or whatever. And he constantly did that, you know, Leo Tolstoy with Wonder Bread or something. No one would ever Think of putting together his courses were like that, not just his books. When I was his.
I will talk about one thing I wanted to self correct.
I shouldn't be saying I was McLuhan's teaching assistant or grad assistant in the singular. He had several people who helped him, including his son, by the way, who was not a student there at the time. And he had two members of his staff.
So I was just one of those who was orbiting him kind of. And he would say, tom, can you go to the airport and pick up this guest scholar? Or, you know, it wasn't typical graduate assistant work. It was his universe had many dimensions to it and many needs for assist, as they say in hockey. And so he would say, tom, can you. You know, and it was an assist in this direction. And to another grad student, can you do this? So, yes, I did that for four years. And yes, I found it very exciting.
But I don't want to falsely claim I was his only grad assistant.
Yes, I became lost in what's called visual and media arts at emerson College for 38 years. So a lot of my teaching was there. But I also taught at Temple University. I taught at University of Maryland very briefly when I was in the White House, so I could do both of those at once.
I taught at Harvard for a while, University of Hawaii for a while, which kind of ultimately seduced me to where I am now. And yes, I taught media theory. I taught theater sometimes I taught public speaking and some of the basic things, but I also taught the actual media, how to make television, how to make film.
And my dominant field became media ethics, which many people say is an oxymoron. But I was very interested in privacy and all the other areas. I put in a PS Miscellaney, which you may or may not edit out. I didn't want people to have the fancy idea that I was McLuhan's one and only mentee. And he was which sometimes when you say teaching assistant, that's a. I wanted to say he had a number of people orbiting him, including. Including about three graduate students. And I was one of those assistants.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Did you meet Paul back then, in the mid-70s?
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Yes.
I would say it was probably a little later than that. But what happened?
I had a really good friend who lived in New Hampshire who was a student of Josh Meyerowitz's. Josh Meyerowitz, NEW Paul. The two of them were going to be getting together in New Hampshire with my friend who was a student of both of them. He was such a kind of Powerful personality. He could bring professors together, which most students can't. And he invited me to join them. And so Paul and Josh and I met and talked, McLuhan and ideas and so forth with this student for a long period of time. That's my earliest memory of Paul. He was at Fairleigh Dickinson.
He's the publisher of the book, so it's really important to acknowledge him. He's done a wonderful job as publisher and promotion, and his own books are worth reading, of course.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: So in your book, you do talk about also everyone that was kind of in that circle, and you talk about the emergence of the Toronto School, kind of in theory, in the days of both, while Henness Innis was still alive.
But that media ecology as a term is something that came about later, I think, once Eric was a scholar and in this circle, maybe did he come up with the phrase or did I. Am I reading that wrong?
[00:36:26] Speaker A: I did a lot of research about that.
And ultimately Lance Strait, who's in position to know, because he studied a lot with Postman and kind of was the heir to Postman's throne. I don't know if he'd put it that way or not, but he carried on and began to develop his own large influence in developing the Media Ecology association and also a journal of that association, and a lot more influence worldwide in continuing McLuhan's name and postman's and Innes' to a lesser degree. And so I asked him, as kind of the leading authority on media ecology, where did it come from? And he said, well, at one point Eric McLuhan thought maybe he might have coined it. And at another point he traced it back and talked to people who were there when the program in Media Ecology was founded and so forth and so on. And Lance was surprised to discover there was no one aha moment that everybody agreed on. And I went back and researched my own notes and I found that Eric had used the term in an interview I did with him, and that McLuhan had used similar phrases. And Bob Logan, who is another leading authority on McLuhan and a co author, went back and looked it up and so forth and so on. And the best answer is multiple people used it early on, but we cannot find an aha moment where, ah, I'm going to coin the term media ecology and I want everybody to use it from here on out.
But it's a very, very popular term in the field now. And you might have said the Toronto School or the communication studies branch of innocent. McLuhan's work has become largely media ecology.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: Media ecology has had an interesting resurgence or popularity in recent years in that I mean, I feel I if we were to do a Google search for the phrase the medium is the message. People say it all the time. You talk about how people use it and they might not really understand what it means.
I'm curious what your take is on this kind of McLuhan moment where a lot either seems validated or at least seems more prescient and memeable than maybe it did in a pre post smartphone world.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: Yes, let's look at in depth. The medium is the message. And by the way, Lance Straight did that and found a long number of ways that you can apply and interpret the phrase and so forth. And John Culkin and others contributed to that. And there are quite a number of authors who became fixated on the phrase as to what it really means.
But let's do something experientially because this is basically a talking head for those who see it and talking voice for those who hear it. So let the audience participate. I want you to hold up your finger in front of your nose. Wherever you are, are whichever medium you're using, close your right eye, then close your left eye and your finger will appear to hop. If you close one eye while you open the other and go back and forth and you have the illusion of motion there.
In McLuhan's day, that's the way that film worked. You had 24 frames per second and an object might be shot from different angles, such as the angle where one eye is, the other eye is.
And it would appear, thanks to what's called the five phenomena, to be moving.
If the object itself was moving, the recurrence of those 24 frames would capture that motion as well, but as an illusion.
And you have another phenomenon called the persistence of vision, which means whatever you see stays on your retina after you close the eye. And so the combination of those two effects created moving pictures.
Now if you're reading something, you have a totally different perception and experience going on.
You have these absolutely meaningless crazy vertical lines that some of which are bent and some of which are straight and so forth that we call the Alphabet.
And you're reading them back and forth, left and right, the way that you might glimpse Arlington Cemetery where all the graves are uniform, or some other cemetery with rows, your eyes going row by row and coming back the way an old typewriter would to the beginning of the row and you're quote reading without thinking about it.
Well, if you're reading the Same exact text as you might see in the movie version of it. You're having a totally different experience.
Think about what happened when your finger moved back and forth. Your retina, your optic nerve, your brain are forced to do very different things than when they see these little squigglies. And they have to translate those into something with supposed meaning, like words and sentences. We take all that for granted.
So one of the experiments that McLuhan did with a man named Ted Carpenter, who was another kind of leader in his group to during the 60s, was they took the book, the very popular novel called the Cane Mutiny.
They looked at it as a book, then they looked at it as a movie, a feature length movie. It became a TV show and it also became a drama.
And what they observed was the medium had enormous impact on it. When it was a book, it was about instant Willie Keith and his sojourn through very difficult circumstances on a ship.
But when it was made into a movie, the hero became the US Navy, because you have these spectacular long shots of people at sea and bouncing around in the ocean.
When it became a play, it was confined to a courtroom because you need drama to make that work. And so there is a trial that goes on toward the end of it. And that's pretty much the heart of the play. Television is so constricted, and it particularly was in those days, that they had to reduce it to the principles, just the kind of three or four leading characters for it to work on tv. You couldn't have those vast shots of ships at sea and see any detail. And you couldn't have a huge cast of characters in just 30 minute episodes, etc. Etc.
So the medium had profound influence on what would seem to be just one message.
Just the way that the finger trick we did and the rows of tombstones at Arlington Cemetery got us thinking about media in a different way.
And that was the whole point of what Innes and McLuhan were doing, was to take us out of the box, to take us out of our routine encounter with implements of communication and make us see them, as Bertol Brecht, the playwright, called it, with a verru fromdung effect.
Make things strange, wake us up to something else that's there.
So McLuhan likened the message of technology to the juicy steak that a burglar hangs in front of a watchdog in order to get in and steal what's in the house.
And so the watchdog is distracted by the stake in order for the thief to enter, and our minds are distracted by the Content in order for all kinds of other things to be happening to us, including in an extreme situation, being brainwashed or being homogenized in our thought.
And so the medium had profound effect that way. And Inness looked at the profound effect it had on history. If you didn't have a particular medium in your culture, you weren't likely to have something else.
And if a new medium took dominance in the same century as an old medium, everything else changed.
When print became king, so to speak, suddenly all kinds of people could know the same narrative. And that would lead to a much more popular, popular sentiment where only the king or only the pope or someone else had access to God or had access to vital information.
Suddenly, the democratizing of that information, the spreading of it, led to a different kind of society.
So you could make all kinds of cases for why the medium is a message, but the most dominant one is it transforms the content and the subdominant one is it therefore transform the people who read that comp. And it transforms the entire society.
So is that a helpful plunge into what's really going on with the medium as a message?
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Absolutely.
We talked about earlier the way that Marshall would playfully use language and use certain analogies or even references in unexpected ways that would push people to question whether he was real or whether to really probe the idea the same way in order to even understand the joke.
But one thing that he brings up a lot, I think that's related to what you just said is a few different children's. I want to say parables, but almost like nursery rhyme stuff. And he brings up the emperor's. The emperor's got no clothes. That story, a lot it comes up in.
It comes up in the medium is the massage, and it comes up in Take Today in slightly different ways. And he uses Humpty Dumpty at some times. So that question I was going to ask you earlier, actually, when we got cut off, that's related to this is like how.
I guess I don't have a full question here. How did that one.
Something about that.
[00:47:21] Speaker A: No worries.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Let me see my notes here.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Hawaii, they say hanging loose is better than hanging. So I'll hang loose.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: Yeah, Hegelis is good.
So, okay, so. And you finished the book earlier this year.
The book is its own work, but it is a continuation of your dissertation and some other works that you had written since then.
Right. As well on both McLuhan and an Innis. Is that correct?
[00:47:55] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
PhD theses are notoriously dry, so I wanted to liven it up, but I Also wanted to update it because there has been an enormous amount written, thought about, even plays written and so forth about Ennis and McLuhan since both of their deaths and since Ennis death, probably twice as much as since both of their deaths. So I wanted to make sure that I was current in talking about the literature, they say, in academe, and also current in terms of AI and social media. And people would often ask me, so what would they say about, you know, the selfie generation? Or what would they say about. And I try and put that in there, too, to make it current, not just in terms of who their current critics and champions are, but also what their thinking means to us. Is it useful?
Can we implement it?
What might McLuhan and Ennis say? So it's no longer a PhD thesis in that regard. I wanted to make it quite interesting and colorful. And so there's some entertainment value in it as well as scholarship. It's a hybrid in that way.
And it's also a hybrid in terms of. I'm thinking about their thinking, not just about their biological biographies. There's a. There's a dual biography in there, and the moment of kind of inception of the Toronto School is in there as well, and the people who carried on the Toronto School. But there's also a lot of new thinking in there about how their thinking would apply to the very world that we face today.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: And you published a book with Paul Evanson, who is also a McLuhan scholar and is a friend of the show and was on the show in the previous episode.
And the book is available on.
It's available on Amazon and through your website, is that correct?
[00:49:56] Speaker A: All kinds of ways. But let's stick to Amazon because that's the easiest way to find it. And Paul is one of the best publishers you'll ever work with because he promotes and in this case, he knew the material, you know, so very seldom do you get to work with a publisher who knows in detail what you're talking about and who can therefore edit or make suggestions, and therefore who has his heart in it, too, because he loves McLuhan and media ecology and loves to write about it.
So Paul is not in any way underrated. He's one of the best people to work with on a book like this.
And I'm so glad he was on your show and that he recommended you. And I talk.
[00:50:39] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. This was a great discussion today.
I've learned a lot and I appreciate you answering my questions and taking me on a journey through time and space. Here.
We should talk again. Thank you very much, Tom. I appreciate it.
Hang ten or hang loose.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: Very welcome.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Thank you, listener, for being here for another episode of the Executive Dropout podcast. That was my guest, Tom Cooper, and I'm Jacob Sager. If you enjoyed this, be sure to subscribe and share it with other folks who might enjoy this kind of conversation. We'll see you on the next episode.
