The marshall mcluhan speaks special collection

The Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection is a historical archive spanning three decades of McLuhan's appearances on television.

Fordham University, New York. Moreover, with a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University and experience as a working journalist, Wolfe had the background to interpret McLuhan for the masses, and the credentials to affirm and validate his work. Clearly, Wolfe recognized a kindred spirit in McLuhan. Like McLuhan, Wolfe has been something of an intellectual maverick, working across scholarly, journalistic, and artistic boundaries, and thereby defying categorization.

Given their iconoclastic one might say non-Euclidean tendencies, McLuhan and Wolfe might well be characterized as parallel lines that did in fact meet. Thus, when the Canadian Consulate in New York approached us about sponsoring an annual McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University motivated in part by the success of the McLuhan Symposium we hosted in Tom Wolfe seemed like the ideal choice to launch the series.

Over three hundred people were in attendance, with an overflow crowd viewing the event from outside the auditorium via closed-circuit television. Wolfe wore his trademark white suit, and when he entered the auditorium the audience greeted him with the kind of applause normally reserved for rock stars. I would suggest, however, that in this case the significance of the event was in the medium rather than the message.

I should add that for those who were not familiar with McLuhan, the lecture served as a wonderful introduction to his life and work. Richards seems to be idiosyncratic to Wolfe, however, and most certainly misleading. And while it is one of his most successful memes, it is less significant than such ideas as the medium is the message, media as human extensions, technologies as human environments, sense ratios, and the laws of the media.

Wolfe may be projecting his own fascination with Teilhard onto McLuhan, and his reading may be debatable, but it is also mostly harmless. Anyone interested in understanding media or understanding McLuhan will not find all that much that is helpful in Teilhard de Chardin, but those who are interested in Teilhard may benefit from being directed to McLuhan.

The song he sings of McLuhan may not be the most accurate, nor the most detailed, but it is the poetic truth, not the facts, that concerns him.