Marshall McLuhan -- you're still a-doin'

My apologies to Dr. Tompkins, Marshall McLuhan is nothing resembling a fraud, huckster, or pop-philosophy trendy dude of the sort that used to be found or at least cited by the excruciatingly uninformed and unformed at virtually every late 1960s 'be-in', 'smoke-in' or even 'screw-in'. I mean, he was cited ad nauseam by the sundry unwashed and/or stoned, but most of them had no idea exactly what was meant by such bits of esoterica as: "The medium is the message," not to mention, "The media is the massage."

So, I vouchsafed, with the intellectual smugness of my puerility, to Dr. Tompkins, that I thought McLuhan was a fraud and in so suggesting, that his ideas were bullshit. Dr. Tompkins, a mature and remarkably intelligent female academic suggested, ever so politely, that perhaps it was that I didn't truly understand what McLuhan was saying or writing. I was miffed, even a bit mortified, as only the young can be when they sense they have been patronized and subsequently dismissed.

And then, I was sitting at my ancient Mac yesterday and thinking about McLuhan. As I pounded on the keyboard of the venerable LC630, it became clear to me just what the "coolest Canadian of the 1960s" had been on about. You see, I had been reading an article in Vanity Fair (OK, I confess, I read VF) about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs -- like, he was the guy who brought my LC630 into being. And, since I have always been an Apple aficionado, and would regularly disdain the lowly Gates-ish PCs in all their incarnations (OK-OK, I am writing this blog on a very current PC, mainly because my antediluvian Mac ain't quite up to the task), I realized that Jobs has been living the McLuhan dream and that for him, and every Mac buff, the medium indeed is the message. It's not so much about how your Mac, i-Mac, i-Pod or whatever does what it does, it's 'that' it does what it does, pure and simple. McLuhan foresaw what the world would be, and people like Jobs have attempted to bring the dream to realization. Bill Gates definitely hasn't. He is a marketer of a service, and one has to give him credit that he, like Henry Ford, saw a need, a filled that niche, and we are where we are. And now we connect via blogs and the like, and such a concept would have been so far beyond the pale even a decade ago that to suggest such would have been dismissed. Except by the people who knew where we were going.
So, I cite the Laugh-In resident versifier of yonks ago, Henry Gibson, who would often ask in one of those blackout sketches: "Marshall McLuhan -- what're you doin'?" Marshall McLuhan did know what he was doin'.
And, as a trivial aside, Marshall McLuhan's brother ran a service station in North Burnaby. He was a bit unclear on the musings of his brother, too.