July 1, 1999

DIGITAL MCLUHAN:
A GUIDE TO THE INFORMATION MILLENNIUM
By Paul Levinson
(Routledge, 1999; $27.95).

hen the digital age went looking for an oracle, it found Marshall McLuhan. The communications theorist and 60's media guru, best known for his dictum "The medium is the message," is listed as the patron saint in every issue of Wired magazine. . McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" was reprinted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. The 1996 Federal court decision that overturned the Communications Decency Act even used McLuhan's phrase "global village." Not bad for a tweedy former English professor who distrusted commerce and who limited his own children's television viewing.

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McLuhan died in 1980, so it has fallen on his many admirers to interpret his words for the age of the personal computer and the Internet. This is the task Paul Levinson attempts with "Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium," with very mixed results.

For readers unfamiliar with McLuhan, Levinson performs a useful service. Many of McLuhan's themes were developed in bits and pieces over his 30 years of writing and speaking. Levinson bases several individual chapters around single ideas. In doing so, he demonstrates the applicability of ideas like the "discarnate man" -- McLuhan's description of a society where people no longer meet face to face -- to the virtual world. His chapter on McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cool" media illustrates just how exhausted those labels have become.

Levinson, who shares McLuhan's weaknesses for bad puns and hyperbole, does have a few disagreements with the master, particularly over what he calls media determinism -- McLuhan's belief that technology shapes people and not the other way around. But for the most part, Levinson eagerly applies McLuhanism to almost every facet of modern communications.

Like many contemporary admirers, Levinson seems to forget that McLuhan was also deeply suspicious of technology and its effects. He didn't care much for computers, he once argued that radio should be shut down and he believed that gadgets reduced their users to a state of "servo-mechanism."

If there is persistent confusion over McLuhan's theories, the fault probably belongs more to McLuhan. A brilliant improviser and self-promoter, he spun off ideas like they were advertising campaigns but he had no gift for logical argument; in fact, he openly disdained it. "Clear prose indicates the absence of thought," he once said.

McLuhan's conceptual slipperiness has been inherited by many digital gurus. Perhaps it is his style, not the substance of his thought, that is his real gift to the wired age. Is the Internet the end of the written word or the rebirth of text? Is E-commerce the next age for the global economy or just the mail-order business in tax-free (so far) clothing? When you register for My Yahoo, are you being pushed, portaled or personalized? As McLuhan himself knew, when you have nothing new to sell, the first thing you do is change the label.

BRUCE HEADLAM