What the Man Who Predicted the Internet Can Teach Us About Creative Work, Virality, and Discovery

Celebrating Marshall Mcluhan's 112th birthday with a deliberation on his legacy, philosophy, and strategy for ideation

Dearest readers,

Two months ago, I commemorated Soren Kierkegaard’s birthday with this post about how his love for people-watching has informed my experience in New York City. I enjoyed this mini-celebration so much (an idea that I stole from

Austin Kleon

) that I thought it would be fun to do a tribute post to Marshall Mcluhan as well. Today marks what would have been the media philosopher’s 112th birthday! Please note that I am only an armchair Mcluhanist, so this post is not meant to be an authoritative breakdown of his philosophy as much as it is an excuse to chat about someone whose ideas are more relevant than ever.

Before we proceed, I also wanted to extend my sincere apologies for how infrequently I have been posting here on

Prolix

. Who knew that consistent writing was such a hard habit to cultivate? The good news is that my schedule over the next few weeks is looking fairly agreeable - so make sure you’re subscribed in order to receive the wonderful (and consistent) content that is in the works. If anyone has tips on how to integrate a writing practice into your life, please feel free to let me know in the comments section.

Now, if you’re ready - let’s turn on, tune in, and drop out!

The eye from the front cover of Marshall’s book “The Medium is the Massage”

Marshall Mcluhan’s generation never knew how to define him. He was, and remains, a notoriously difficult person to stick a label to. He was a Canadian, a late-life Catholic convert, a professor, an inventor, a consultant, a pop culture icon, technology prophet, and media savant who made appearances everywhere from Woody Allen films to Playboy Magazine (as a writer, not as a model… that would be truly unusual). In spite of his mega-popularity, he was frequently criticized for being difficult to understand. In a 1976 interview with NBC, he was asked directly why this was the case. He responded:

“Ordinarily, people are trained to follow you and connect everything you say with what they last heard. They’re not prepared to use their wits, they’re only prepared to use the last idea they picked up and try to connect it to another idea… they have preconceptions that phase them out at once.”

This is a classic Mcluhan response. In fact, I’d argue that it is perfectly consistent with the main theme of his intellectual career, which was dedicated to breaking the default frame that individuals use when attending to the world. He was constantly averting people’s focus away from content and onto context; from seeing only the particulars to seeing the whole system; from thinking about the message to thinking about the medium. I believe this is because, at his core, Mcluhan was a teacher. Like all exemplary teachers, he sought to cultivate the independent faculties and unique intellect of his pupils more than he sought to relay a stale set of principles.

Personally speaking, Mcluhan’s words only partially contributed to the total affect of his answer. I was more impressed by the tangible cool that he exudes while giving the response. He seems, at least superficially, completely at ease with being misunderstood. Mcluhan knew that the cost of truly alternative thought is being mostly unintelligible, at least for a time. 

For entrepreneurs, innovators, or artists, this can be a difficult challenge to navigate. On the one hand, generating work solely as a vanity project might be personally satisfying but often ends up being seen or bought by very few people. On the other hand, creating what we know will be accepted because it intentionally mimics popular artifacts is degrading. It robs the endeavor of its creativity and risk, which is just another way of saying that it makes life unbearably boring. Many pioneers have lost their way in the maze of these two opposites. Finding your way around novelty and acceptance is not an easy task, especially if you are genuinely ahead of your time.

Schopenhauer has a classic quote on this topic:

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first stage it is ridiculed, in the second stage it is opposed, in the third stage it is regarded as self-evident.”

An unverified quote from Henry Ford puts it this way:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Mcluhan, riffing off of Shakespeare, put it this way:

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot... for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

So how did Marshall navigate this challenge? Does his reputation for impenetrability mean that he threw commercialism to the wind and became a complete free radical? Not exactly.

Mcluhan was comfortable with being misunderstood, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t make efforts to be understandable. Being the authoritative expert on the contours between medium and message, it seems to me that he realized he could play with the form of his work while still remaining true to his underlying purpose. This is perhaps best seen in his relationship to the world of marketing. Mcluhan’s grandson,

Andrew McLuhan

, has a fantastic Substack which dives into some of the lesser known details of Mcluhan’s legacy. Andrew’s recent post discloses how Mcluhan’s skyrocket to fame was not an accident at all, but was orchestrated by one of the most prolific advertisers of the 20th century. It is well worth the read!

Yet even on his own, Marshall was a formidable advertiser. The man knew how to capture attention and maximize his time in the spotlight. One of the cornerstones of his relevance was his ability to coin catchy quips that were culturally portable and socially potent. He was one of the first people to recognize society’s appetite for sound-bytes and tantalized the masses with thoughtful, humorous, polarizing, or sometimes strange sayings. His knack for condensing piercing insights into pithy statements was an art form that he intentionally deployed to export his ideas to the world. This ability is best heard through live interviews, but here are some quotes of his that showcase this remarkable talent for turning a phrase:

The Medium is the Message! 

When all is said and done, more will have been said than done.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

To the blind, all things are sudden.

All violence is a quest for identity.

High rises and miniskirts - the end is in sight!

Can you imagine how this man would have dominated in the era of Twitter/Mastodon/Threads? For more thoughtful discussion on Mcluhan’s mastery of language and the way that he thought of words as the ground of human existence, I highly recommend this excellent

Clinton Ignatov

post from

Default Wisdom

.

But let’s unpack this more:

The first step to this type of alternative thinking (that actually serves people) is to stop seeing their resistance as a rejection and begin to see it as an invitation to refine your work. In order to enter this narrow gate, you have to become a glutton for feedback while maintaining enough resolve to keep trying. One of my favorite Mcluhan moments was his appearance on the Dick Cavett show, where he seemingly derails the interview in the first minute because he wanted to ask the musicians their thoughts on his latest theory of sound and speech. Mcluhan wasn’t just hamming it up for the television either, apparently he did this all the time.

Neil Postman, the famed author and media ecologist, termed this “putting people on” and told a story about Mcluhan’s curious habit in a speech at NYU (slightly revised for clarity): 

Mcluhan, Charlie Weingartner, and I were together in a hotel room at a teachers conference in Cincinnati at about three in the morning. We've been talking all night. Charlie and I were just exhausted and we thought it was time to go to sleep. I could tell Mcluhan was in the room because the lights had been turned off and I could see the glow of the cigar as he kept talking. He would say, “Well, what do you think of this idea: that the invention of the railroad led to divorce or…” I can't remember exactly what. Mcluhan would go on and on with this. I remember Charlie said at one point, “Marshall, it's 3:30 in the morning, give us a break here!” But this didn't deter him. Then, suddenly he’d say one of these connections. It was sort of like a little game he would play. “What do you think that this thing might have led to this thing” and he'd finally say something that made you sort of jump up… For him, scholarship was truly a kind of exploration. He would often remark that he didn’t necessarily believe in the things he was saying.”

I adore the language of play and exploration that Postman uses. If there is a singular takeaway from Mcluhan’s example for creators, it’s that explorers are more likeable than experts. Explorers get to discover, while experts have to deliver. If I were to use the more business-oriented language of startups, I would say that Mcluhan was continuously iterating. He was constantly improving his thinking through a cycle of exploring, discovery, exploring, and discovering. He respected himself enough to know that he had something to say; but he respected the audience enough to pivot when they said it was no good. By doing so, he was able to sustain his output of new observations, but also find the form that would allow his viewpoint to thrive. This is the Mcluhan way! 

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Recap:

• Mcluhan gives us permission to not only be misunderstood, but to embrace it as an opportunity for improvement. 

• His career demonstrates that assuming your demographic is both intelligent and competent actually increases the quality of your work. It positions you to aim higher.

• Feedback is the key to honing ideas that are both quality and communicable.

• Play and practice don’t necessarily have to be separate. Brand yourself as a work-in-progress and people will learn to journey with you.

Thank you for reading! If you could help me refine my ideas by sharing your thoughts in the comment section, I would be eternally grateful. Also, please consider subscribing to Prolix by hitting the button below. Remember, you can always unsubscribe later. ;)