Wisdom Weavers by Tom Cooper: A Book Review

Abstract

This comprehensive review of Tom Cooper’s Wisdom Weavers explores the intellectual “symphony” composed by Cooper to honor the lives, relationships and legacies of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. It interprets the text through the Association for Media Literacy (AML) lens, evaluating how Cooper humanizes these two Canadian giants while tracing their influences from ancient Greece to the digital age.

Keywords

Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Humanizing, Epistemology

Writing a review of Wisdom Weavers is a compelling challenge. Several reviews have already been published, so I feel a pressure to avoid what has already been said. On the other hand, I have an opportunity to write some things that have not been said, hopefully adding to the conversation. As a McLuhan-influenced media literacy teacher and a long time Marshall/Eric McLuhan fan, this review will have a bias towards media literacy education. I also want to construct a review that avoids spoilers and makes you want to read this book. As with many reviews, this will be about me as much as it is about Wisdom Weavers because its points of view are filtered through my life experiences.

Because this review is contained on a digital platform, I do not have to worry about word length. One or five thousand are of little consequence on the server. I can quote at length and write on and on—and I will.  This wordiness is a direct result of the medium is the message, an insight Innis passed on to McLuhan. 

Tom Cooper is an artist and academic. Both of these roles have influenced Wisdom Weavers. Specifically, the book might be framed as a symphony. It has movements, solos, duets, a coda and themes as Dvorak might have composed. 

A symphonic structure might seem unexpected when we consider Cooper’s long and successful academic career. It would be reasonable to expect a double-academic biography to be heavy on facts and light on narrative structure.  Yet the symphonic metaphor is strong. Producing a book that has a symphonic structure is a great example of one of the Association for Media Literacy’s Key Concepts: media construct versions of reality. More on that later.

Cooper is also a dramatist who has created musicals as well as biographies. Dramatics, then, is the lens he brings to Wisdom Weavers. Specifically, he represents Innis and McLuhan as both weavers of narratives and characters within narratives—referencing Hamlet’s play within a play. He writes of them as being both storytellers and musicians. Both of these constructions are successful. 

Wisdom Weavers presents a platonic love story between two Canadian geniuses. There is an arranged lunch meeting by an earnest academic matchmaker. Their first meeting is awkward—their relationship seemingly doomed—in true love-story manner. But they give their relationship a second chance and the match succeeds. Phew! Philadelphia Story or When Harry met Sally works yet again.

Making Connections

One of many things the two scholars had in common was their ability to make connections. This not only became one of their greatest accomplishments but it modeled making connections for us. We live in a precariously disintegrated cultural environment, partly as a result of the age-old effects of print and partly the effects of digitization.  Making connections is a paramount 21st century thinking and survival skill.

Wisdom Weavers also makes connections between the two men and their ideas, which can help readers understand and appreciate Innis and McLuhan’s humanity as well as the magnitude of their contributions.

As part of the book’s making connections, it presents a narrative arc from ancient Greece to 20th Century Canada.  This construction helps readers understand and appreciate the two men’s intellectual predecessors and that they were standing on the shoulders of giants. McLuhan’s work also traces an arc from his thesis on the writings of Thomas Ash through James Joyce, especially Finnegan’s Wake, and his gratitude for Innis’  influences.

Such representations are reassuring to people who might have thought that these two generated their insights spontaneously during the 20th century rather than appreciating that their contributions resulted from some 2400 years of intellectual struggle. It also affirms the value of education, especially university studies.

Storytellers

Cooper frames Innis as a storyteller, specifically in his books about the Canadian fur trade, Cod fishery and lumber industry. By interpreting Innis’ books as narratives, readers can understand and appreciate the evolving relationships between Canadian culture and Canadian industries. 

McLuhan is also framed as a storyteller, but more a postmodern than modern weaver. Because of his ongoing study of and enthusiasm for poetry and electric culture, his narratives have a mosaic structure and his multiple metaphors cause readers to work hard to follow his stories (Innis was renowned for his plain-speaking.). Think Allen Ginsberg writing an essay. McLuhan also loved James Joyce’s writing, but didn’t go full-Finnegan’s Wake in his books. He did, however, delight in metaphors, and Cooper has honoured his predilection by using metaphors—simple and extended—constantly.

For example, Cooper labels Innis and McLuhan with a variety of metaphors. In McLuhan’s case, these include Man of La Manitoba (what might the windmills be?), the coach house coach, The Marshall, Dr. McLuhan, the Manitoba Bard, The Sage of Aquarius, the electric sage, The Manitoba maverick, the Ontario oracle and the professor. The labels are not used together–the clustering is my construction–but are distributed broadly among the story events. While these labels are playful, they carry great meaning. Multiple labels suggest that McLuhan was many characters playing many roles to his different audiences.

Academics

Wisdom Weavers would be a good read for anyone curious and/or concerned about 21st century communications and their effects. Unfortunately, there are qualities that might discourage some readers. One is that this is a distinctly academic book. That it is written by an academic is clear from Dr. Cooper’s impressive CV. But it is also written FOR academics. One indicator of this is its 600-page length, a daunting read for any but the committed. Another is its characteristically academic use of footnotes–about 150 for each chapter. A third is its vocabulary, which some readers might find discouraging (cavilers, stimmung, adumbrated, ululations and aperçus). By comparison, the AML presents McLuhan’s ideas in accessible ways, using plain language and common examples.

As part of that accessibility, the AML promotes the uses of its 8 Key Concepts, distilled from a list of 19 shared with us by UK media educator Len Masterman. (https://aml.ca/resources/eight-key-concepts-media-literacy/) Three of the Key Concepts are particularly germane to WW.

Media construct versions of reality.

This Key Concept addresses 2 biases: the bias of the creator and the bias of the medium. It also connects to McLuhan’s axiom that ‘the medium is the message,’ a refinement of an Innis idea.

Audiences negotiate meanings.

This Key Concept addresses a third bias: people’s worldviews act like lenses which influence the meanings they make from their media experiences. The Key Concept also connects to the second—sadly neglected—portion of McLuhan’s famous medium-is-the-message axiom: ‘and the audience is the content.’

This Key Concept also applies spectacularly to McLuhan because his training in poetry studies—especially metaphors, puns and other word play—allowed him to bring that perception to the significant meanings of pop culture texts and media environments. A related McLuhan construction that I especially like for its playfulness is, ‘I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.’

Media contain social and political meanings.

Innis’ insights regarding the impacts of Canadian industries are especially good examples of this key concept, but so are McLuhan’s pronouncements on effects, in particular his explanations of the societal and personal effects of print and electronic media environments.

Epistemology

Wisdom Weavers has been exhaustively researched and much of the research is well used to inform. It quotes Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: “McLuhan’s greatest contribution was not only to communications studies, but to epistemology … he discovered a new method for Thinking.”

Epistemology has emerged as a key 21st century challenge. The “firehose of information” produced by news sites and billions of social media contributors has been joined by a tsunami of Gen AI information.  Never has it been more imperative to pay attention to and reflect on how do we know what we know? Substantial resources help people sort real from fake but, as Eric McLuhan observed, “All news is fake.” –because it is all constructed. Recognizing authentic and inauthentic information is not the important goal: rather it is important to understand HOW it is fake, WHERE it has come from, WHAT it has been designed and distributed to do, and its effects: HOW users choose to use the information–e.g., act, ignore, revise, challenge, share, etc. This is paying attention to the medium as well as the content and—because it acknowledges agency—is a more ecological and healthy response. The section of WW that addresses epistemology is especially significant and useful because paying attention to the medium as well as the content is the key to digital media literacy.

In the later chapters, the book addresses the crucial need for an understanding of epistemology:

“The way that we (mis)understand ourselves and our world is constantly altered not only by our media environment but by our inability and unwillingness to inspect and deconstruct it. [my italics]

It is not just society and sensation which are altered within our brave new world but also the very heart of epistemology, phenomenology, personal relationships, and self-understanding. McLuhan’s assertions and implications magnify important and eternal Questions.”

The blending of Innis’ and McLuhan’s ideas about epistemology are more relevant in 21st century digital environments than they were in the 1950s.

“The question arises, then, of whether anything may in fact be “true” ? Or is truth a fantasy of literate culture, a concept created by print or by writing? Or by another medium? Is what Marshall McLuhan says “true”? Or are his words simply a perspective created by his own plus-que-literate background during an age of electricity? Is truth, if it exists, relative to the medium bias by which it is delivered or surrounded?

Or relative to culture? What of McLuhan’s religious beliefs which claim an eternal truth? What of his academic values dedicated to the pursuit of truth?”

These ideas focus on Modern/Post-Modern worldviews, and are fully relevant to our 21st century struggles to understand truth.

Concept/Percept 

McLuhan’s concept/percept distinctions are both important and useful in this 21st century, helping us understand media effects. McLuhan stated, ‘it is easy to fool the literate man, whereas the tribal man is harder to fool.’ This notion is a great example of the socialization and acculturation that accompanies literate learning because literate socialization and acculturation force us into specific heuristics and prejudices that often prevent us from seeing the bigger picture. I.e., the literate environment provides a comfortably limited environment that excludes many important experiences and ideas. These effects are part of the conflicts raging around the emergence of Generative AI, and understanding them might readily help us.

“The mind either perceives or judges. The acts are entirely different. When perceiving, a person is full of life, interested, curious, open and receptive… But in judging a person is concerned with controls, regulating limits and precedents.”  

This idea again connects to the AML Key Concept that “Audiences negotiate meanings.” i.e., it is the attitudes that we bring to our interpretations that impact our learning.

“What is communicated in a “percept” is next-of-kin to or some mixture of insight, intuition, awakening, and impressions rather than the ossified cognitive units called concepts, beliefs, judgments, and dogma.”

Cooper takes much time listing and exploring dialectics, an epistemological strategy used by both scholars. Innis used dialectics with the intention of better understanding an idea via comparing it to its opposite. McLuhan used several dialectics: 

Rhetoric cf. grammar

Left brain cf. Right brain 

Written, literate civilization cf. Oral, tribal culture

Percept cf. concept

But what if their literate predilection for using dialectics—which began with Greek culture—is a cognitive trap that restricts us to binaries of either/or when we might better perceive ideas and allow for both/and? The extreme polarities that we are experiencing in many socio-political arenas seem to be the result of dialectics (concept) rather than percept. The oral/‘tribal’ concepts of both/and might help us make more sense of our digitized experiences. It is possible to have our opera and eat it too—Bohemian Rhapsody.

Innis-McLuhan afterlife.

Innis died in 1952; McLuhan in 1980. We have lived through a lot of media evolutions since then and have seen many changes. It is understandable that some might think Innis’ and McLuhan’s ideas are passé in our digital environment, or at least in need of profound updating. The last sections of Wisdom Weavers imagine what the two might have thought about 21st century communications and culture.

“How could they look away from phishing, “fake news,” Deep Fake videos, spam, flaming, the dark web, identity theft, cyber-terrorism, noise pollution, the digital divide, and a host of other ethical issues introduced and amplified by media innovation and saturation?”

These prognostications unfortunately lean more toward the negative than the positive effects of new media experiences. Social media have also saved lives and GenAI has been used to invent new ideas, medical treatments, etc. The promises of GenAI—like all tools—are both beneficial and risky. 

Fortunately the book balances some of these negative effects:

“Some of these [digital benefits] as identified, named, and described by Kuskis, included “cool (cf. interactive, participatory) pedagogy,” elimination of lectures, probing, classroom without walls (cf. the world as classroom), shift in teacher role from sage to guide, interdisciplinary approach, media literacy, use of multiple media (not just books), and “learning a living.”91”

Wisdom Weavers is an ambitious and prodigious book that helps us understand Canada, the world and media effects. Humanizing Innis and McLuhan makes their work more accessible to readers. Their ideas are as cogent and useful now as ever—in many cases more than ever.

Wisdom Weavers illustrates how each man practiced lateral thinking and made connections that changed our epistemology, showing us a better way. We are indebted to them and to Tom Cooper for helping us understand and appreciate their contributions to 21st century culture.

I leave the last word to Marshall McLuhan:

“It is too late to be frightened or disgusted, to greet the unseen with a sneer…. The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted; the machine easily masters the grim.”31