McLuhan Messaged Up My Mind

Abstract

This is clearly my story and analysis of the impact of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on my own work.  As a broadcast student, shortly after UNDERSTANDING MEDIA came out, I/we were cautioned about the “controversial” thinking.  We were told not to read it, but I did and was fascinated.  Looking back, I realize McLuhan’s ideas affected my work with children greatly.  I spent many years teaching children to tell stories, make videos, and think critically about the tidal wave of media around us.  I couldn’t have told you this when I was in the middle of it, but it all happened with a backdrop of storytellers being the message, paying attention to media as extensions of themselves in the city as classroom, and then on to the global village.

Keywords

Storytelling, International Video, Harry Skornia, Crystal Bowls, Peace Literacy

I joined ACBB (American Council for Better Broadcasts) when I stumbled into the broadcast program at the University of Minnesota in 1967.  I also read the recently published Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan.  The professors warned us, “Don’t read this.  It will mess up your mind.”  I didn’t care.  My mind was already churning, and as a storyteller I could move past the complexity to recognize McLuhan’s writing as an extension of metaphor, which lies at the heart of much literature.

McLuhan relentlessly fused telling and listening—the polar forces of true storytelling—often within the same sentence.  His writing is an extension of Mill’s On Liberty, that truth emerges when opposing ideas can go “head to head” while still listening to each other.  Early on, McLuhan  learned speed-reading techniques and used them to read eclectically in the spirit of Mill’s argument.  

Years later, Philip Marchand’s remarkable biography, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, helped me understand McLuhan not just as a theorist but as a person.  He was a devout Catholic who believed prayer was a continual dialogue with the Creator.  He was the last person in the neighborhood to buy a TV set, and he loved Tom Lehrer’s satire.  

Media, Conscience, and Contradiction

I started higher education in Speech because I was already working for Minneapolis Youth for Christ as an Evangelist with street kids.  I quickly learned that they responded far more to storytelling than to preaching, so I enrolled briefly at an “approved” Christian college to teach myself how to tell stories.  I was teaching children to let the love of God overcome violence, but my conservative beliefs began to fray under the weight of college costs, the draft, and the church’s insistence that killing the enemy in Vietnam was separate from saving “everyone” from hell.  

When I switched to the much less expensive, godless university, their Speech program had a broadcast component which interested me.   Edward R. Murrow had just gone to work for Voice of America because the network’s “bottom line” was hampering solid, investigative reporting.  My Advisor Don Browne, had come from VOA, and I thought I might be interested in International Broadcasting.  I kept working with young people, but moved to more secular venues.  

As my interests moved beyond Dr. Browne’s expertise, his eclectic colleague, Len Bart, became my advisor until my degree and draft notice arrived in the same day’s mail in 1970.  I served as a conscientious objector, unarmed Medic, committed (in my mind) to getting soldiers back home where they belonged. During that period, I earned university credit for anti-war radio documentaries, running a junior-high radio club, and experimenting with children using newly portable video equipment.  I  also encountered Harry Skornia’s critique of television networks owned by major defense contractors. Years later, when I rediscovered his Television and Society on my bookshelf, I realized it was the only book I had kept from broadcast school.

Children, Media, and the “From-the-Heart” Message

By the late 1970s, McLuhan’s expansive thinking had pushed me far beyond seeing media merely as a system for selling things, many of them unnecessary.  I was active in teaching children to tell their own stories and make their own video, which brought me to the FOR KIDS BY KIDS channel ACBB sponsored in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.  

In 1986 my wife Elaine Wynne and I won a grand prize in the Tokyo Video Festival for helping children exchange “homemade” international video letters, and I realized I had found my way “full circle” back to a different form of international video.  By then ACBB was renamed National Telemedia Council, and Director Marieli Rowe wrote about the award in the Journal.  In the next issue Dr. Harry Skornia congratulated us.  Marieli connected us with Dr. Skornia, and we spent much time with him before he died in the mid 90s.  Most today have never heard of him, but early proponents of educational TV call Skornia the founder of Public Broadcast in this country.  Unlike the professors who told me not to read McLuhan, Skornia tipped him toward mainstream acceptance by inviting him to speak  at a National Association of Educational Broadcasters conference.  McLuhan first used the phrase “the medium is the message” in that talk, and Skornia then got a grant for him to teach 11^th graders to do media analysis.  

The Storyteller is the Message 

McLuhan described media as extensions of human capabilities, and almost right away I thought “The Storyteller is the Message”.  Media performers can learn the skills of imagining a live audience, or looking into the camera to create the illusion of eye contact, but they cannot see who they are talking to.  Storytellers can listen to the group in front of them, look them in the eyes, smile, and even switch stories if that feels right.  They can deliberately invite listeners to tell their own story, but their very presence does that.  A person telling a story from the heart, even when it lacks professional polish, communicates a powerful truth:  I do not always have to depend on expensively produced stories delivered mechanically from a distance.

This is why representation matters. An African American teacher standing before a classroom of Black students is a message in itself, regardless of the story being told. And when technology fails, a skilled storyteller can still carry the day.

In the 80s when I was more active with the organized storytelling community, I wrote an article titled ”Storytelling on Video is Not Storytelling.”  It upset many performers who sought legitimacy through high-level media exposure.  I didn’t have McLuhan processed enough to put him in the article, but he was there.  The trend was the ancient art of storytelling being swept up in the impact of the new media, and I was trying to say we should never lose the importance of telling stories as a live, personal, and interactive experience.  I was just trying to say, “Never forget that storytelling on video is merely a record of one time it happened.”   

 Chippewa-Cree storyteller friend, Ron Evans, told about a Peace Corps volunteer bringing a TV set to a remote African village.  When he returned, the TV was sitting unused in the corner.  “What’s wrong?” said the volunteer.  “Did the TV break?”  The villagers responded, “It’s fine, but we don’t need it.  We have a storyteller.” The volunteer argued, “Storyteller?  The TV has a lot more stories than any old storyteller.”  To which the villagers replied, “We know that, but you don’t understand.  Our Storyteller knows us.”  In 1982 James Naisbitt alluded to that more personal element amidst technology in his book, High Tech, High Touch.  Of course, McLuhan had already suggested the same with his picture book, “The Medium is the Massage.”  I think I spent much of my life trying to get television to behave like that high touch storyteller who “knows us”.

The City as Classroom 

Much of my professional life unfolded in outdoor and alternative education, often with students who struggled in conventional classrooms but excelled in the arts.  There were many detours, but ultimately I became an educational specialist, teaching every class in the school to “Be Their Own TV”, to tell stories, make videos, and to think critically about the growing tidal wave of media.  I had learned experientially that the arts, including storytelling and videomaking, were excellent entry ramps for some learners, and was pleased when education began to devote more emphasis to different learning styles.  

I now know McLuhan had actually taken an early interest in right brain/left brain learning theories.  Maybe someone has written about this, but I wonder if Marshall McLuhan was an early “right brain” kid who made it, and if Dr. Skornia was an early prominent educator recognizing the brilliance of different ways of learning. 

Education is still a bit trapped in letting kids off in the summer to work in the fields, something McLuhan would call “rear view” thinking.  Meanwhile, agriculture has long followed mass media expansion with gigantic farms that process and package food to be advertised and shipped even internationally for greater profit.  I have long believed there should be some merger of public schools and outdoor education, some form of year round  education with “vacations” spread out, for just taking a break, or for extended experiential learning in the community.  This would be combined with ready access to solar-heated (or wind-powered) media production studios to help children go out and “bring the city back into the classroom.” 

Similarly I have advocated in the past for structuring middle school programs totally around media production.  Being awash in an infinity of incomprehensible media and political chaos simply adds to the milieu of adolescent floundering.  Why not go way beyond simply adding a few media classes?  Why not reorganize all that adolescent energy into learning all subjects by researching, writing, and performing to turn information into bites they can and want to grasp because they made it themselves.  Of course, that has always seemed too much to assimilate for administrators grappling with budgets and standards.  Nonetheless, McLuhan’s City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media became the lens through which I viewed teaching. 

TV can take children places they might not otherwise go.  As children, we once witnessed a ball of garter snakes roll out of underground hibernation, untangle themselves and slide off into the sunshine.  Video crews have the luxury of setting up and waiting hours or days to catch even more remarkable feats of nature for all to see on TV.  Similarly, children with a video camera on a walking field trip can capture wonderful scenes with a perspective a professional might never have.  

McLuhan called all media extensions of people, and he wrote of the wheel as media extending our legs. Renting a school bus for a class field trip is expensive, but I sometimes extended the video walk with a much less expensive trip via the wheels of public transit.  Back then a classic video advocacy story was a street light changing too fast for pedestrians.  No one listened until some school students checked out a video camera, took it downtown on the bus, and set it up at the crosswalk to get scenes of angry motorists honking at slow seniors in the crosswalk.  The timing on the light was changed.  

Today, cell phones with video cameras are common.  You don’t have to check them out.  I understand the concern about distractions with phones in the classroom, but couldn’t we learn to mediate between valuable and inappropriate cell phone usage?  As I write this, activists in my city with cellphone courage to record the inhumane treatment of immigrants are “changing the timing on racism”.

Extension of the Soul 

When I was growing up in conservative Christianity, missionaries came to our Sunday School to show slides of their work.  They would snicker politely, saying the “natives” believed if you took their picture, it would steal their soul.  Over the years I’ve observed that a case could be made that mass media is stealing our collective soul, fueling hunger for fame, profit, and spectacle.  McLuhan himself struggled with this concept.  He didn’t hire promoters to make him famous, as many do today, but he had difficulty when thrust into the spotlight.  He wasn’t opposed to making more money for his family, but he had trouble with folks insisting he should charge much more for his talks.  Perhaps he thought such media-driven fame was artificial.  Maybe his devout Catholicism had him concerned about love of money being the root of all evil, or the New Testament warning about gaining the whole world and losing one’s soul. 

 When I was drafted, I had a plan for a local TV show where children were the talent on the show.  After returning from military service in 1972, local children’s TV was being eliminated.  I was determined to make something happen, and ultimately had the opportunity to start a CCTV channel at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital.  It was far more local and specialized than I had imagined, with patients overcoming their fear of shots and surgeries by learning and having fun while making TV themselves.  This occurred while I was reluctantly using the GI Bill to earn a teaching certificate, enabling me to use storytelling, videomaking, and media literacy as instructional tools. The hospital channel made me temporarily famous. Putting an earthworm puppet in front of the camera to interview hospitalized children’s teddy bears drew media coverage from everywhere, and I was invited to do things like a workshop with Mister Rogers at a children’s TV conference in D.C. and “open” for Captain Kangaroo at a Kennedy Center children’s TV event. 

Then the Minneapolis schools recruited me to be their first Cable TV Coordinator.  I just wanted a teaching job, but teachers were being laid off nationwide.  I took the Cable TV job only because it seemed like a way in.  I told them,“I’ll do this if we put priority on making camcorders and teacher training available so children can learn to make videos.  My experience is that making a video gives you inherent tools for thinking critically about all the media we consume.”  

I immediately created a slot identified as made by children on the school channel. According to the Superintendent, “They didn’t look professional.  That included the videos, made by children, that would later be put together to win the Tokyo Video Festival.  I was furious, saying, “Let me talk with him. We hang children’s art on walls all the time.  People watching multimillion dollar TV don’t know how to compare that to kids making their own video with a camcorder.” My plea failed.  

Later I learned that Susumu Hani, described as the Francis Ford Coppola of Japan, was the judge who fought the hardest for us to win the Tokyo prize.  He had that inherent sense of media literacy and fought for us because the school exchange showed racially diverse groups of children working with friendly, firm, but not-autocratic staff.  He and others wanted more of that in Japan, and he felt the children’s “from the heart” videos captured it more powerfully than an expensive documentary ever could.

By now I had gone to work in the new International Fine Arts school to teach children to tell stories and do international video exchanges.  NHK, the PBS of Japan, came to tape the Grand Prize winners teaching children to make videos.  The local CBS station also sent someone to tape the NHK crew taping the kids making videos.  I got talking with him about the whole project, including the removal of the kids’ videos. He was aghast, but not surprised.  He said the schools had paid him magnificently a year earlier because they wanted to make school board meetings look like network TV.  He ended up telling them, “You’ll never be able to come up with the money needed for that.  You should be showcasing things made by students.”  

No one else ever told me that had happened, but it was just one place where unfortunate decisions were made and money unwisely spent by adults severely lacking in media literacy skills.  Thank God for groups like the International Council on Media Literacy, but there are still too many powerful people who have lost their souls.  They want media structures overpowering anything resembling “liberty and justice for all.”

The Global Village 

McLuhan said the media puts us in a global village.  When I was doing international video exchanges, it took weeks, or even months, to make a video, transfer it to proper international standard, mail it overseas, and finally get a video response.  Today, with live video on the internet, two people or two groups can talk and listen in real time, lending the possibility of greater understanding and peacemaking.  Still, Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book, How to Fight, said, “Never in human history have we had so many means of communication – television, radio, telephone, fax, email, the Internet – yet we remain islands, with little real communication between us.”  

Years ago, when I read War and Peace in the Global Village, I was a peace activist wanting McLuhan to say war is wrong, and we have to stop people from killing each other.  As I reread that book while writing this story, I saw more clearly how long it had taken me to recognize that I had not left rigid, judgmental thinking behind when I left fundamentalist Christianity.

The concept of “If you don’t believe as I do, you’re wrong”, is everywhere, even in science and social justice activism. The war readiness group wants to be first to have the next weapon or technology to attack the enemy who is anyone who disagrees.  The disarmament group argues all would be well if we didn’t spend all our money on weapons, but they often lack a strong story for how to make that happen.  They just keep attacking the bad people who are also anyone who disagrees.

Thich Nhat Hanh also said, “The peace movement can write very good protest letters, but they are not yet able to write a love letter.”  He insisted we learn to write articulate, thoughtful messages that leaders might want to read and consider, rather than angrily throw in the trash.  Maybe McLuhan doesn’t have to say end all war now.  Maybe we just need guidance on media as extensions of our ability to listen. 

A Bowl, a Bell, and a Broadcast for Peace

In June 2001, my wife Elaine and I were at a New York City conference on science and spirituality.  On September 11 of that year, the church where the conference was held became an emergency care center when planes crashed into the World Trade Center.  That conference featured crystal “singing” bowls, and I had to have one.  A felt wand rubbed around the edge of the bowl collects and amplifies a mystical sound of ringing like the 1918 bells that signaled the Armistice ending the War to End All Wars. Crystal was used in early radio receivers because of its innate ability to capture sound, and my bowl became part of a storytelling media literacy program tracing crystal to radio, conch shells to brass instruments, hollow logs to electronic microphones, and more.  I used the bowl many places for twenty years.  

Shortly after October 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel, the bottom of the bowl fell out when I picked it up.  Devastated, I glued the pieces back as best I could so it still worked, though with diminished sound.  The next day I told the full story of the bowl, saying, “It may be coincidence the bowl broke the day this awful war started, but crystal is very sensitive.  I’m just glad there are high level people working hard to stop wars like this.”  Shortly after this, that group gave me a new bowl.  I was overwhelmed with gratitude.  The bowl rings out love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.  

Similarly calming, the Minneapolis schools KBEM radio is an innovative station where students work with professionals to give great Jazz to the community.  I’m aware that Marshall McLuhan loved jazz, and maybe he knew Arkestra, an old jazz band playing music to save the world like Noah’s Ark.  Arkestra’s leader, Sun Ra, was a conscientious objector during World War II because he believed no one had the right to take another’s life.  His spirituality was a creative amalgam of many faith traditions, including those from his own ancient African American roots.  All of them taught that loving God means loving your neighbor.  

After World War II, Harry Skornia proposed RADIO FOR PEACE, a captivating program where the “best” radio talent would come together once a month to teach and inspire the world to live in perfect harmony.  That show never materialized, but I’d bring it out now if I had the power to broadcast from a crystal bowl.  I’d have Captain Paul Chappell, a prominent peace activist, author, and lecturer, host and put a strategic spin on an array of activist musicians like Sun Ra, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and many more.  

Chappell grew up in the South, amidst overt racism, domestic violence, and untreated PTSD.  His mother was from Korea, and his father was an African American Veteran of the War in Korea.  Captain Chappell worked through his own trauma after serving in Iraq, then created the Peace Literacy Institute.  When I first met him, I was struck by his saying, “If a bunch of people could work long and hard to make slavery illegal, we can find better ways to deal with international conflict.”  Chappell’s work merges the best of West Point military leadership training with the classic nonviolence teachings of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dr. M.L. King, and others.  His curriculum is the epitome of listening, and it’s available to use at no cost by any school or organization.  

Chappell has written several essays that connect peace literacy to media literacy: “Our God-Like Technological Powers” and “The World of Electric Light: Preparing for the Coming Technology Trauma.”  You can find them and more information about the Peace Curriculum at PeaceLiteracy.org. Telstar was launched just before I got into the University  broadcast program.  Those communications satellites made worldwide TV transmission possible, and the first live show to the World was in 1967.  The Beatles wrote “All You Need is Love” to perform on that program, at the same time McLuhan was messaging up my mind.  He believed in prayer, and I’m praying we continue to improve our understanding of media as extensions of our abilities to listen and to love one another all over the world.

Sources Referenced

Chappell, Paul K. “Our God-Like Technological Powers.” Peace Literacy Institute, 2020.

— — —. “The World of Electric Light: Preparing for the Coming Technology Trauma.” Peace Literacy Institute, 2021.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. How to Fight. Parallax Press, 2013.

Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. MIT Press, 1989.

McLuhan, Marshall. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Agincourt Press, 1977.

— — —. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

— — —. War and Peace in the Global Village. McGraw-Hill, 1968.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Bantam Books, 1967.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Penguin Classics, 1985.

Naisbitt, John. High Tech, High Touch. Broadway Books, 1999.

Skornia, Harry. Television and Society. McGraw-Hill, 1965.