How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan

• In Event: Promiscuous Concepts: Histories of Forward-Looking Technology, Ideas, and Institutions

Abstract

As James W. Carey observed in 1967, "Perhaps the most interesting thing about [Marshall] McLuhan is the degree of success he has enjoyed." This paper treats McLuhan's career as a case study in the sociology of intellectual celebrity, with a focus on the Canadian literary scholar's crossover resonances with U.S. popular media, business/management discourse, and academic movements. The claim is that three features of McLuhan's pronouncements on media and technology were decisive: (1) their future-facing orientation; (2) their optimism; (3) and their pithy portability. Fittingly, these formal aspects of McLuhan's thought were far more important to his enduring celebrity than the radical media formalism he espoused. It was, in other words, his prophetic, portable optimism that resonated with a shifting cast of champions in the press, business and academic worlds. The paper recounts the story of McLuhan's initial, meteoric fame in the late 1960s, and the ongoing, posthumous revival since, as a diverse, sometimes clashing, succession of adoptions by groups whose support maintained McLuhan's visibility. One thread running through the analysis is the shifting dynamic between academic status and popular renown, with McLuhan suffering short-term prestige penalties but long-term visibility gains for appearing on, say, the cover of Newsweek (in the 1960s) or Wired (in the 1990s). The paper traces the context-jumping aphoristic ease with which McLuhan was taken up in 1960s business and media culture, Silicon Valley in the 1990s and in strands of media theory more recently.

Author

• Jefferson D. Pooley, Muhlenberg College