Define please: Mcluhan-esque?

Question

Please help me out with this term.

Answer 1

Well... not to be obvious, but 'McLuhanesque' typically means 'of or similar to McLuhan's ideas'. So let's talk about what his ideas were.

Most of them tended to gravitate around the media. McLuhan refused to draw a connection that seems almost obviously to be there - the one between a person and sources of information. Yet this point of view leads to some curious insights.

To McLuhan, things like television and radio weren't just devices or entertainments, they were SENSORY ORGANS. By watching a TV, he argued, you were in a sense BECOMING the TV. And thus you know things that are on TV in almost the same sense that you know things you have personally seen. An email from your friend may hold the same significance as the voice of your friend. In this sense HOW something is presented can be as significant as WHAT information it contains, because the medium controls how you interact with that information (one of his most famous expressions is, 'the medium is the message').

This, he thought, creates a breaking down and a building up. If you 'see' wherever there is a video camera, then in a sense you are almost everywhere in the world at once (his term for this is the 'global village'). And if data is as real to you as other stimuli, then the data itself becomes a commodity which can be bought, sold, and traded (and far better and faster than the actual real stuff).

So we can kind of infer from this the kind of thing that the term 'McLuhanesque' would be used for: certain kinds of particularly stand-out media, situations where information is essentially 'real', or occasions where global information-sharing has made distant things seem immediately present.

Some may also use the term in a more personal manner, for McLuhan did have a certain characteristic style in appearances, how he presented information, and the like. In one recording of his he is constantly being interrupted by discordant messages, for example. He also liked to confound people with comments like, "You don't like those ideas? I got others." and "You think my fallacy is all wrong?". So you might see it used in that manner too.

Hope that helps!