Mcluhan's Wake

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), also called the oracle of the electronic age, is most famous for his statement The medium is the massage, referring to the capacity of the media to mould every message. Although essentially a faithful catholic of the conservative kind, he wanted to study new developments to be able to give them a discriminating look. One of his chief warnings implied that new electronic media like television would annihilate the rational civilisation of mankind brought about by the printed word. After his death, and because of the emergence of the Internet and new media, the ideas and theories that he developed from the fifties were rediscovered by a new generation. Director Kevin McMahon combines various techniques, including animations, rare footage of McLuhan and dramatic reconstruction, to reveal how the image of and the assumptions about modern technology are influenced by his theories. The film focuses on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story A Descent into the Maelstrom, which McLuhan often submitted to explain his ideas about new developments. He recognised it as a lesson that taught mankind to look critically at the maelstroms that the new media are, to prevent being swept away into the depths. At the end of his life, McLuhan ended in these depths, shoved aside by the media and broken by fellow scientists who called him terribly conservative and outdated.