In February, Paris Review Daily featured a James Atlas interview with Douglas Coupland about the latter’s recent biography of Marshall McLuhan:
“Did you see him as a prophet of the revolution in global communications?
Douglas Coupland: No. Like most people, I only knew his three clichés: Medium equals message, global village, and the scene from Annie Hall . I’ve found that most people truly would like to know more about the man, but it’s almost impossible to do. His language is a universe unto itself and is astonishingly dense and hard to navigate. He died the year I started art school [1980], and his stock was at an all time low. His name never came up.
Why did you believe he was still relevant?
Douglas Coupland: Well, I didn’t. I had to figure that out myself. It took months of reading and rereading his stuff to realize that in Marshall we had a classically trained scholar realizing that there’s this thing coming down the pipe—the Internet—yet because he didn’t understand the ultimate interface, he was frustrated in his inability to describe it clearly. I think that’s what people really respond to in Marshall: the almost vibrating sense of being in on one of the biggest prognostications of all time, yet having news of its arrival coming from this fuddy-duddy guy in 1950s Toronto. How on earth did that happen?”
More McLuhan posts:
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“Hello Doug. Would you personally miss bees if they disappeared?”