Marshall McLuhan's message was imbued with conservatism | Lance Strate

Although an icon of the movement against-culture, the man who coined the phrase "the medium is the message" was not hipster pills

Marshall McLuhan

better known by many for his rise to fame as the original "media guru", the theme of a multitude of newspapers and magazines and broadcast interviews, not to mention a cameo in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall.

Because McLuhan was first adopted by the movement against-culture of the 1960s and, more recently, web evangelists, people sometimes believe that the man himself was a kind of pill hipster-popping. They could not be further from the truth.

Far from sharing the sympathy against the counter-culture life forms, or forms of media embraced, McLuhan made a point of failure of retention, refraining from moral evaluation of describe and explain processes. In any case, it was the conservative side of McLuhan sometimes conspicuous by its position as an observer. He never condemned the Vietnam War, suggesting instead that it was more a media event of an actual event. He mentioned the possibility of using the media as a form of control, "using television in South Africa ... to cool the tribal temperature raised by radio ", without recognition of the Orwellian implications.

As a conservative Catholic, has tended to downplay the significance of printing with respect to the Protestant Reformation, a point stressed by many experts in other media. But the fact that his ideas could be adopted by radicals and reactionaries alike a testament to his genius and his ability to transcend their own weaknesses and human errors.

Although it was later recognized as a prophet, McLuhan insisted he was simply describing what was happening in the present, while everyone was obsessed with the past (looking " through the looking glass mirror ", as he says). As for electricity, electrical technology and electronic media such as Samuel Morse's telegraph and wireless Guglielmo Marconi was able to understand the TV, so no had, and saw the seeds of new media environments to arrive. Because he understood this, not the future, their ideas are as valid today as it was a half a century.

McLuhan approach is particularly suited to help us understand the new technologies introduced into the culture. His rise to fame at the beginning was mainly due to its ability to explain the new medium of television and the dramatic social changes that generated it. At a time when the baby boomers is a new culture "cool" to young people who went against the "hot" prospect of their parents, McLuhan had an explanation. The "cool" cultural style was a product of television, including the low resolution of the image requires more cognitive processing of high definition experience can get radio and film and processing, or participation, there had a tendency to suck the member of the public, creating a sense of participation in the message. "Hot media," however, require less cognitive effort, freeing the audience to act. This knowledge led to Hitler that McLuhan could not have succeeded in a televised media.

addition, television, exposing viewers in the world with an unprecedented immediacy and intimacy, was the creation of what he calls a "global village", a new form of tribalism that finished with the identity, individualism and private nation-state - all products of print culture. The world of television window was taken to a transparent society in which we are all too close for comfort, with a depth potential for aggression and violence (including, for example, terrorism).

McLuhan famous aphorism "the medium is the message," said the heart of its approach to media, packing a dozen or more different meanings. First, it is a wake up call. McLuhan asks us to pay attention to the environment, rather than being distracted by the content. The content is not free of import, but it pales in comparison to the impact of the medium itself.