McLuhan in Reverse

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge what I believe to be the source of my insight that reversals play a key role in McLuhan’s GToM. Although I have been involved in McLuhan studies since 1974 when I first met Marshall McLuhan and began working with him, the insight that reversals played such a key role in his thinking is only a recent insight that is not more than a year or two old. I believe that what prompted this insight was the suggestion that Izabella Pruska-Oldenhoff made to me when she posited that there was a spiral structure to Marshall McLuhan’s thinking. This led to a paper we wrote together entitled “The Spiral Structure of Marshall McLuhan’s Thinking (Logan and Pruska-Oldenhoff 2017).” We further pursued this idea in a chapter in a book in press with Springer entitled A Topology of the Mind. The reason I wish to credit Pruska-Oldenhof’s identification of the spiral structure of McLuhan’s thinking with my insight of McLuhan’s use of reversals is that the spiral structure contains the notion of reversal. As a spiral goes forward in one direction it reverses itself in the plane perpendicular to the forward motion going back and forth in a circular motion.

The original idea for Chapter Four was formulated as a direct result of listening to Douglas Rushkoff’s presentation based on his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto on November 21, 2016. The idea was further developed as a result of the dialogue Doug and I had during his seminar presentation and in the private ←ix | x→conversation that ensued after the seminar as well as the result of a number of email exchanges. The idea presented here that we become the content of digital media is basically Doug’s with the exception of the twist I gave to it by suggesting the flip that we are extensions of the digital media we make use of instead of McLuhan’s notion that our media are extensions of us, both of which are claimed to be true.

Preface

I first met Marshall McLuhan in 1974 at the Coach House on the campus of St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto. I was a professor of physics carrying out research in theoretical elementary particle physics, lecturing, supervising grad students, and from 1971 teaching in a seminar course, The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry. The objective of the seminar course was to introduce humanities students to physics without making use of mathematics (i.e. the poetry of physics) and integrating it with a study of poetry and other forms of literature that were related to physics (i.e. the physics of poetry). I started the course because I felt that too many bad decisions were being made by politicians and business people who had no basic understanding of science.

When I came up with the idea of the course I had no idea it would change my life, but it did because it became my ticket for meeting Marshall McLuhan and my subsequent collaboration with him. In 1974 after returning from spending three months studying and collaborating with Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca Mexico I organized a future studies seminar at New College known as the Club of Gnu. The name was a portmanteau of the New College mascot, the gnu and the Club of Rome, a prestigious NGO of futurists that had just commissioned the study The Limits to Growth. I recruited different professors to join the Club of Gnu from different departments in the University. Among them was Arthur Porter, the Chairman of the Industrial Engineering Department who I visited in his office. ←xi | xii→He enthusiastically signed on to the project and immediately called his friend and colleague Marshall McLuhan asking him to join the Club of Gnu. When he mentioned my name, McLuhan asked “is that the Bob Logan who teaches the Poetry of Physics course?” Porter answered in the affirmative and McLuhan said send Logan over to the Coach House. I want to talk to him and invite him for lunch. And that conversation over lunch led to the start of my collaboration with Marshall McLuhan which lasted to his passing in 1980. During the six years I worked with Marshall I divided my time equally between working and publishing with him and pursuing my physics research. Once McLuhan was gone I decided to devote myself fully to carrying on his legacy publishing my last physics paper in 1982.

I have, therefore, concluded that McLuhan’s body of work constitutes what I have called his General Theory of Media (GToM) and that the underlying theme of this theory is his use of reversals. This is the thesis that will be explored in this book. While McLuhan’s famous Laws of Media are part of his GToM there are nine other elements of the GToM that I have identified. They are 1. his use of probes; 2. figure/ground analysis; 3. the idea that the medium is the message; 4. the subliminal nature of ground or environment revealed only by the creation of an anti-environment; 5. the reversal of cause and effect; 6. the importance of percept ←xii | xiii→over concept and hence a focus on the human sensorium and media as extensions of man; 7. the division of communication into the oral, written, and electric ages along with the notions of acoustic and visual space; 8. the notion of the global village and finally, 9. media as environments and hence media ecology.