Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, and to celebrate his century mark I present the following excerpt from Jane Howard’s 1966 Life magazine article, “Oracle of the Electric Age“:
No people in the history of humanity, McLuhan insists, ever faced demands as grueling as those that confront us. We are witnessing simultaneously the end of what he calls the Mechanical, or Gutenberg, Era, dominated by movable type and later mechanical forms, and the birth pangs of the new and entirely different Electric Age, which he sometimes calls the Age of Circuitry, or of Information. As his books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media explain, the change is the most traumatic since the transition 9,000 years ago, from the paleolithic culture to the neolithic, from hunting to agriculture.
The change, says McLuhan, is making movable type obsolete and with it books, newspapers, magazines–in fact all kinds of printed matter, including the sentence you are now reading. We will also have to junk the by-products of the Gutenberg invention which, says, McLuhan, have created our culture’s visual, literary, detached, linear approach to life. This dooms a lot more linear by-products than you might think, including railways, clotheslines, stocking seams, the grid system in city planning and stag lines at dances. Even points of view must go–“because it’s no longer possible to take a fixed position for more than a single moment.” So must jobs, which are fragmentary in nature and do not suit the new age in which people crave roles with depth involvement.•
