From the very start of The Medium is the Massage I was very engaged by McLuhan’s early, almost ergodic literary style. The mirrored and upside down page sections, the integration of images and text and the anti-establishment messages all had a distinct 1960s psychedelic feel. Some of the visuals seem almost straight out of the animated Beatle’s movie, Yellow Submarine. You can almost hear the Beatles and the Doors playing in the background as you flip through the pages. Despite the fun and engaging imagery, McLuhan does have many serious points to convey. While riffing on the perceptions of the youth and their regard for education, McLuhan writes:
“We now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors…The dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth-century” technology as manifested in our educational establishments.” (101)
After reading the above quote I couldn’t help but immediately think of Timothy Leary’s iconic 1960s one-liner: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” McLuhan’s words seemed too close to Leary’s to be coincidental so I decided to do a little research. I began scouring the internet for any possible evidence of either McLuhan’s own use of psychedelics, or a possible connection to Timothy Leary.
While I couldn’t find any evidence of McLuhan’s own drug use, I did find a surprisingly dense amount of information regarding his relationship with Timothy Leary. In fact, Leary actually credits McLuhan for inspiring him to coin his catchphrase of “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”! Leary was a huge fan of McLuhan’s ideas regarding media and social influence and saw him as someone to look up to, a team-mate against the establishment or status-quo of the 1960s, a crusader for awareness and technological enlightenment. The ideas of perception and media as extensions of consciousness resonated strongly with Leary’s own psychedelic explorations and commentary on the media. Leary viewed himself as being on the same wavelength of medium awareness as McLuhan.
Though references to Leary, Beatles movies and Jim Morrison may seem dated, McLuhan’s take on education still remains relevant. Aspects of the “teach-in” movement seem to still be occurring in classrooms from the elementary to college level. Talk of shifting education from memorization and presentation to a process of discovery by students still holds weight today. We are learning in the aftermath of this idea. The clay tablet assignment last week as a prime example of this teaching style and its integration into classrooms. By having students figure out their own ways in which to roll, inscribe and share their own clay messages the role of education is almost completely reversed from the style used decades ago. Back then a teacher probably would have only lectured to students about the process of inscribing clay.
By having his book taught in classrooms, I’d say that McLuhan was successful in his claim that “Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery-to probing and explorations and to the recognition of the language of forms.” (100) Media literacy is now an actual course subject, something McLuhan would have pushed for. Students are taught to recognize the way media subtly massages their lives. The medium is now widely and popularly recognized as an important part of anymessage, a message that may vary based on which molecule’s were ingested by the audience.
ergodic definition from:
http://www.articleworld.org/index.php/Ergodic_literature
(reminded me slightly of House of Leaves, not sure if The Medium is the Massage is truly ergodic though as it is non-fiction?)
photos and info on McLuhan-Leary relationship from:
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/03/timothy-leary-and-marshall-mcl.html
background on Leary from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#Influence
