Marshall McLuhan and the Inevitability of our Current Media World

I’ve just started reading a biography of a great Canadian – Marshall McLuhan – written by another great Canadian – Douglas Coupland.

Until now, I’ve found McLuhan’s writing to be somewhat impenetrable.  But with the potentially game-changing release of the iPad last weekend, I’ve been thinking about hot and cool media, leaning back vs. leaning forward and consumption vs. creation and have felt a need to give Marshall one more poke.

I was rewarded very quickly with this quote on page 10:

The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.  A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to seedily tailor data of a salable kind.

MM 1962

Wow.  The fact that 48 years ago, Marshall McLuhan was able to predict the online world as we are now experiencing it speaks to its inevitability.  It makes attempts at creating closed environments and erecting pay walls seem all the more feeble, like trying to stop the flow of Niagara falls with a chain link fence. 

That's it.  I'm hooked.