Ever since my pal Peter Hirshberg got me hooked on Marshall
McLuhan about five years ago, I've enjoyed learning as much as I can about the man who predicted the social, silly, indispensible Internet and the mechanisms, such as search, that would enable
it. What's most remarkable about McLuhan is that he made his predictions beginning in the 1950s and never lived to see the fullest manifestation of what he predicted.
He was the
first to talk about a coming "global village," coined the phrase "the medium is the message" and was among the first to be concerned that context would soon become more important
than content itself. He foresaw the coming echo chamber and what that might mean for independent thought, the exchange of ideas and the ability to evolve one's own thinking as a result of
such exchanges.
A new biography,
"Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!" by Douglas Coupland, is a wonderful read about a man who predicted the world we live in today from the middle of the last century. From
his deep thinking about advertising, the rise of television and society's increasing embrace of mass media, he was able to envision, almost exactly, the exhilarating and often bedeviling culture
of mass communication and precisely targeted advertising that increasingly drives our daily activities.
In last week's New York Times Book Reviewarticle on the book, David Carr pulled a quote of
McLuhan's that he couldn't have known would be particularly prescient given the tragedy that unfolded in Arizona
over the weekend: "'When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other,' McLuhan said. 'The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces
and very abrasive situations.'"
Though the gunman who critically injured a Congresswoman and killed a total of a half-dozen people on Saturday seemed to have acted on his own crazed
impulses -- the only one of his online ramblings that indicated a particular political persuasion was the desire to return to the gold standard for the U.S. dollar -- the national soul-searching that
followed the incident seems to validate what McLuhan predicted.
And as prominent political figures scrambled to scrub their Web sites of the rhetorical and graphical flourishes that
could be construed as an endorsement of the hunting down and killing of political opponents over the weekend, search advertisers who bid on terms relating to gold, the gold standard, and those
advocating for a return to it no doubt similarly scrambled to ensure their ads weren't anywhere near this awful news story.
Carr points out in his review that the wildly profitable world
the Internet has enabled has its sad consequences: "...what happens now that everyone is a broadcaster? Ubiquitous, cheap technology (digital cameras) and a friction-free route to an
audience (YouTube) means that people might broadcast images of their closeted gay roommate having sex, and that the unwitting star of their little network might subsequently, tragically, jump off a
bridge."
But I digress. My point, truly, is that a study of the man who predicted the world in which we now toil is both instructive and illuminating. Such a study can serve
as powerful guidance as you consider the audiences you're trying to reach, as well as the means and methods for doing so. This most recent biographical sketch is a good place to start.