Canadian Media Guru Deserved Better
by Mike Gange

Marshall McLuhan, Wise Guy
by Judith Fitzgerald
XYZ Publishing, $15.95, 202 pages

Was Marshall McLuhan wise or just a wise guy? Sometimes a bit of both.

Judith Fitzgerald’s biography of Canada’s best known media observer is a sympathetic portrait of a man who could be as mysterious as some of his famous quotations are profoundly thought provoking.

Ms. Fitzgerald is a former Globe and Mail reporter who has also published 16 books of poetry. Her breezy treatment of McLuhan traces his history in Winnipeg as a young boy, then later as a student at University of Manitoba, and still later at Cambridge, through to his eventual employment as a University of Toronto professor. She moves quickly through McLuhan’s rise from literary critic to oft-quoted media guru and cultural critic.

For the most part, Ms. Fitzgerald paints McLuhan in a glowing light. She glosses over or ignores completely McLuhan’s push-pull relationship with his mother and his mistreatment of his cross campus colleagues at University of Toronto. She barely acknowledges his difficult nature in his more mature years.

However, she does make a valiant effort to explain one of McLuhan’s best known quotations "the medium is the message." She relates how the phrase came to popular use after a speech McLuhan made to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters in Nebraska in 1958.

She writes, "By media, he elaborates, he does not simply mean information-packed magazines, newspapers, radio , televisions and billboards; rather he defines a medium as any extension of the of the body, brain or being...McLuhan does not suggest that content plays no role; rather it plays a distinctly subordinate one. By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, he states, we lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on man.

But Ms. Fitzgerald’s writing sometimes gets in the way of her own message about the man who was a master of messages. Her casual tone is often annoyingly superficial and she works as hard as she says McLuhan might have, to bring out a bad pun, using terms like "sarcaustic", "blisstatic," "quip lash" "doctor of digitalia." and "oracular opinionist" to describe McLuhan.

Ms. Fitzgerald’s talent as a writer of creative non-fiction shines through, as she recounts conversations that McLuhan might have had as if they were factual, by writing in the present tense. Some of the anecdotes she relates clearly come from the 1989 biography Marshall McLuhan by Philip Marchard, and many other nameless "quotes" are used by Ms. Fitzgerald; both unfortunately weaken what she is trying to do.

This biography about the man who pondered whether a medium was "hot or cold" is unfortunately just lukewarm.

Mike Gange teaches Media Studies and Journalism at Fredericton High.