cLuhan’s approach to any question was to refuse to have a fixed viewpoint. For McLuhan, understanding always requires a multidimensional approach. To fully understand anything, he argued, you have to look at it from several points of view. So, McLuhan would have gone against his own beliefs and teaching with just a single take on anything. With no fixed viewpoint, his writings present no complex argument, no thesis developed over a long stretch.

he unsettling result in The Mechanical Bride was intended. McLuhan claimed that his work offered a mosaic, or field, approach to the questions he studied, in the same way that the media effects he probed reorganized audiences’ perceptions of the world around them (more on “probes” later). In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan jolts his readers into an awareness of how books function as a medium (more on this later, too!)

The point is, if we read The Gutenberg Galaxy or other books by McLuhan with the dis-comfitting feeling that we have not read such works before, and ask ourselves what makes McLuhan’s books different, then we get a starting point for some pretty astounding insights into what media and their real messages are all about.

ut McLuhan also warned that such reorganization of perception could be bewildering to those who cling to the older, linear order of things and a single “practical” point of view.

He cautioned that we should step into his writings the way we step into a bath:

—The exact entry point is of no importance, because a moment later we will be in a new environment—

… water in the case of the bath,
…media in the case of McLuhan.

o, the organization of a McLuhan book is more like that of a newspaper. Yet, while stepping into a newspaper is inevitable, McLuhan claimed that stepping back from it, to perceive it as an environment, is indispensable to understanding its power and its effect.

“The inside point of view would coincide with the practical point of view of the man who would rather eat the turtle than admire the design on its back. The same man would rather dunk himself in the newspaper than have any esthetic or intellectual grasp of its character and meaning.” (The Mechanical Bride, p. 4)

et us now step into McLuhan’s biography. who was Marshall McLuhan and how did he come to be called the sage of the television age?