In June 1959, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) approved a proposal by Marshall McLuhan for a study of media. This became the book “Gutenberg’s Galaxy” which was itself the forerunner to his seminal “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” published in 1964. “The NAEB gave McLuhan a completely free hand to design a teaching method and syllabus for use in introducing the nature and effects of media to the curricula of secondary schools.”
This Project 69 was jointly sponsored with the US Office of Education, and McLuhan set about assembling ideas including doing interviews with leaders in the field of media studies, He sort of compiled his research into a kind of container of everything he found interesting, or promising to pursue further. Some have called the book he produced a “mosaic” rather than the narrative we presume a “book” will provide. The Gutenberg Galaxy is challenging, in the way most McLuhan’s writing is challenging, because the reader must participate in the creation of meaning far more than with other writers, and the progression of ideas isn’t so very linear.
In a sense, pun intended, McLuhan is writing from the perspective of a fish who has discovered air, and we are the fish who are occasionally leaping into a new space, but only glimpsing something strange and different. McLuhan offers innumerable cryptic hints as to what’s “really going on”. Here’s an animation done recently that might help a little bit to “get him”.
‘Marshall McLuhan looks back to what the printing revolution did to us and looks ahead to what the electronic revolution will do to us. Our world tomorrow will be utterly different, in ways we cannot even conceive. Marshall McLuhan pulls the curtain aside for us. Vision such as his is a precious gift.’
Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global village’ that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries — despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous.
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Clearly we need to be very aware of how changes in the extension of man, as McLuhan called various advances in technology, change who we are, how our minds “work”, and how learning needs to evolve to match the new forms of knowledge. McLuhan gives us one set of perspectives to use in that pursuit of becoming aware of media today.
Some extensions of man seem fairly straightforward as to what they might change, such as the wheel, or the horse. Yet even there, concomitant change occurs that is unexpected and unforeseen. For example, the conjunction of the horse and the wheel made chariots possible which because a dominant new military technology, that created new empires that had perfected it, which spread their ideas of religion and government and even writing. Or a new form of ship, such as empowered the Athenians to spread their ideas across the Mediterranean, setting up colonies and trade in much of the various coastal areas of that huge region.
But when it comes to extension of man that involve “media”…we run into the problem of reflexivity. It’s very hard to see ourselves AND the means of our perceptions at the same time. How can we then become aware of what effects media has on us, how we are changed, how forms of knowledge evolve as forms of media evolve?