ABSTRACT
The year 2006 was a good one for Marshall McLuhan. He finally got his PhD published, 63 years after completion, and the Times Literary Supplement ran a lead review article by Paul Barker on a new collection of his work with a cover illustration featuring Chantelle, a manufactured ‘celebrity’ from the Big Brother TV programme.2 The full page close-up of Chantelle’s bleached blonde hair and crimson pout was not what TLS readers might have expected from this highbrow publication, but the image (and its context) were undoubtedly, as the caption stated, ‘Pure McLuhan’. McLuhan himself, of course, was not around to enjoy this triumphant moment, having died in 1980, but it was an eloquent sign of his continuing modernity. Since other intellectuals who made their reputations in the 1960s have not worn very well in recent years, that is a remarkable achievement, and anyone reading McLuhan today will be struck by the extraordinary prescience of his observations on the media and the way they shape our cultural environment. It is difficult to believe that the statement ‘The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’ could have been made in 1962, long before the advent of the personal computer and the Internet. This is one of his most famous pronouncements, but it is also entirely typical. Typical, too, is its formulation as a soundbite, a term that he did not invent but that nonetheless captures a wide range of McLuhanite themes: oral and aural media, the TV interview, acoustic space and knowledge as aphorism.
