The Playboy Interview:
Marshall McLuhan
A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of
media
In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English
students at the University of Toronto -- and a coterie of academic admirers who
followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two
remarkable books -- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1964) -- and the graying professor from Canada's western hinterlands soon found
himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the hottest academic
property around." He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant -- and
frequently baffling -- theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name
has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of
pop culture.
Though his books are written in a difficult style -- at once enigmatic, epigrammatic
and overgrown with arcane literary and historic allusions -- the revolutionary ideas
lurking in them have made McLuhan a best-selling author. Despite protests from a
legion of outraged scholastics and old-guard humanists who claim that McLuhan's
ideas range from demented to dangerous, his free-for-all theorizing has attracted
the attention of top executives at General Motors (who paid him a handsome fee to
inform them that automobiles were a thing of the past), Bell Telephone (to whom
he explained that they didn't really understand the function of the telephone) and a
leading package-design house (which was told that packages will soon be
obsolete). Anteing up $5000, another huge corporation asked him to predict -- via
closed-circuit television -- what their own products will be used for in the future; and
Canada's turned-on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engages him in monthly bull
sessions designed to improve his television image.
The complete Interview - March 1969
Questions about Marshall McLuhan - The medium is the massage
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