Editing Marshall McLuhan (section)

=== ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' (1962) ===
{{Main|The Gutenberg Galaxy}}
Written in 1961 and first published by [[University of Toronto Press]], ''[[The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man]]'' (1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of [[orality|oral culture]], [[print culture]], [[cultural studies]], [[media ecology]] or [[media-adequacy]].<ref>Giessen, H W (1995), „Remarks to Marshall McLuhan“. In: Communications. The European Journal of Communication. Vol. 20, No. 1, (April) 1995, 129–135.</ref><ref>Giessen, H W (2015). "Media-Based Learning Methodology: Stories, Games, and Emotions". In Ally, Mohamed; Khan, Badrul H. (eds.). International Handbook of E-Learning Volume 2: Implementation and Case Studies. Routledge, 43-54.</ref>

Throughout the book, McLuhan makes efforts to reveal how [[communication technology]] (i.e., [[alphabetic writing]], the [[printing press]], and the [[electronic media]]) affects [[cognitive]] organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|p=41}}
<blockquote>[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.</blockquote>

==== Movable type ====
McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic, [[Tribe|tribal]] humankind to the [[Electronics|electronic age]]. According to McLuhan, the invention of [[movable type]] greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means [[phonemic orthography]]. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from [[logographic]] or logogramic writing systems, such as [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]] or [[ideograms]].)

Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the [[Gutenberg press]] was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from [[William Ivins]]' ''Prints and Visual Communication'', McLuhan remarks:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|pp=124–126}}
<blockquote>In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.…<p>The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.</p></blockquote>

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in ''[[The Medium Is the Massage]]'') <!-- BOOK TITLE IS MASSAGE NOT MESSAGE DO NOT CHANGE -->is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects [[social organization]]: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual [[Homogeneity and heterogeneity|homogenizing]] of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: [[individualism]], democracy, [[Protestantism]], [[capitalism]], and [[nationalism]]. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual [[Quantification (science)|quantification]]."<ref>McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. ''[[The Gutenberg Galaxy]]''. p. 154.</ref>{{verify source|date=November 2019}}

==== Global village ====
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic [[interdependence]]" wherein electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation to a [[collective identity]], with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the ''[[global village]]''.{{efn|Sometimes [[Wyndham Lewis]]'s ''America and Cosmic Man'' (1948) and [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'' are credited as the source of the phrase, but neither used the words "global village" specifically as such. According to McLuhan's son [[Eric McLuhan]], his father, a ''Wake'' scholar and a close friend to Lewis, likely discussed the concept with Lewis during their association, but there is no evidence that he got the idea or the phrasing from either; generally, McLuhan is credited as having coined the term.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=McLuhan |first=Eric |year=1996 |title=The Source of the Term 'Global Village' |url=http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm |magazine=McLuhan Studies |issue=2 |access-date=December 30, 2008}}</ref>}}

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making [[value judgment]]s:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|p=32}}
<blockquote>Instead of tending towards a vast [[Alexandrian library]] the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, [[Authoritarianism|Big Brother]] goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…<p>In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.</p></blockquote>

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no ''per se'' moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's [[self-concept]]ion and [[Self-realization|realization]]:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|pp=157–158}}

<blockquote>Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?…<p>Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that [[Detribalization|detribalizes]] or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus, print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this [[visual technology]] by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.</p></blockquote>

The moral [[valence (psychology)|valence]] of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the [[Causality|causalities]] and effects inherent in our technologies".<ref>''Gutenberg Galaxy'' p. 254.</ref>

Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years after ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:<ref>{{cite web|last=Getto|first=Erica|date=July 14, 2011|title=The Medium Is the Massage: Celebrating Marshall McLuhan's Legacy|url=https://www.wnyc.org/story/145612-celebrating-marshall-mcluhans-legacy/|access-date=April 23, 2015|publisher=WNYC|location=New York|archive-date=April 14, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150414215200/http://www.wnyc.org/story/145612-celebrating-marshall-mcluhans-legacy/|url-status=live}}</ref>

<blockquote>The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.</blockquote>

Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term ''[[surfing]]'' to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "[[Heidegger]] surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as [[Descartes]] rode the mechanical wave." [[Paul Levinson]]'s 1999 book ''Digital McLuhan'' explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution.{{sfn|Levinson|1999}}

McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's ''Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue'' (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write ''The Gutenberg Galaxy''. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in ''America''.<ref>''America''. Vol.&nbsp;107. September 15, 1962. pp.&nbsp;743, 747.</ref> However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."<ref>''New Catholic Encyclopedia''. '''8'''. 1967. p.&nbsp;838.</ref> McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [''The Gutenberg Galaxy'']. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of ''Understanding Media'' [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."<ref>{{Cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qBNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+seems+to+me+a+book+that+somebody+should+have+written+a+century+ago.%22 |title=Letters of Marshall McLuhan |date=1987 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-540594-1 |pages=285 |language=en}}</ref>

McLuhan's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' won Canada's highest literary award, the [[Governor General's Award for English language non-fiction|Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction]], in 1962.  The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, [[Northrop Frye]].{{sfn|Gordon|1997|p=109}}