Eric McLuhan on The New Culture - Part II

By John D. O’Brien, S.J.

(cloudfront.net)

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Eric McLuhan, son of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and a communications scholar in his own right. Eric and I later corresponded on a few questions concerning the new digital technology that is becoming pervasive today. In the course of this exchange, he told me about a talk delivered to a group of university rectors at the Lateran University in 2009, in which he discussed certain pressures that students face today. Dr. McLuhan’s points from his unpublished 2009 talk continue from Part I as follows.

Part II

5. The aesthetic of these circumstances derives from manipulations of being. Each new medium brings with it a new mode of group being, a new WE … Each new medium collects older ones as “features” even as it becomes included in others as a feature — a process that will continue until all have become features of each other. Their future is features. Gadgetry. Narcissism for the self-less.

What did Eric McLuhan mean by this statement? It seems to echo, in part, two classic points from Marshall, that 1) electronic media will restore “tribal man”, and 2) that each new medium contains its predecessor. Manuscripts contained the previous “oral accounts”, just as radio “contained” the newspaper story, and television “contained” the radio report, while the Internet contains all previous media as a pole around which they gather and converge. Since the dominant medium in a society determines the nature of our social being, the Internet will eventually consume us or become an endless reflection of ourselves, which is essentially the same thing.

Eric McLuhan on The New Culture

By John D. O’Brien, S.J.

ericmcluhan.com

Part I

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Eric McLuhan, son of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and a communications scholar in his own right. Eric has been continuing his father's line of reflection and insight since the 1970s and has authored or co-authored some half-dozen books. He gave me a helpful recommendation for my thesis, a work by Swiss philosopher Max Picard on silence that transformed my outlook on human communication.

McLuhan and I later corresponded on a few questions concerning the new digital technology that is becoming pervasive today. In the course of this exchange, he told me that in recent years, he had delivered three talks in Rome on the subject, which remain, to my knowledge, unpublished. The first talk was to a group of university rectors at the Lateran University in 2009, in which he discussed certain pressures that contemporary students face. He made main eight points, all sharing a certain similarity, but together constituting a typically “McLuhanesque” reflection – original, sometimes counter-intuitive, but always illuminating. His main points were as follows, in his words, with my own modest and querulous commentary.