Tuesday 28 July 2009

Marshall McLuhan and and Sylvester Weaver: Two False 1950's Media Prophets

In 1957, I was awarded a Carnegie PostDoctoral Fellowship to create a new interdisciplinary course on the Mass Society for Penn’s Department of American Civilization: a heady assignment for a newly Ph.D-ified 30 year old. It was to be a two semester course: Fall-- Mass Communication (Print, Graphics, Broadcasting); Spring-- Mass Production(Industrial Design, Architecture, Urban Planning).

Its program was simple: against a brief history of each specialty, identify the work of outstanding current exemplars in each sector, say, Saul Bellow, Ben Shahn, Paddy Chayefsky; George Nelson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jane Jacobs. And speculate on how their influence could be multiplied. The dominant alternative had been humanists wailing about the dead end of mass culture. I was to plan it the first year—and start teaching it the second.

Serendipitously, the billionaire Philadelphia publisher, Walter Annenberg, in 1958 gave Penn $2,000,000 to found the first Ivy graduate school of communication. Faute de mieux, I became the gofer for this enterprise as well, spreading words of our ambitions throughout the media and academic communities. Because Gilbert Seldes book, “The Seven Lively Arts”(1924), had turned me on to mass culture studies, I talked the brass into appointing him the first Dean. And thus became his gofer! What a ride.

My good luck in the emerging field had begun in 1955 when the Ford Foundation awarded me a grant in New York to explore the ideas I posed in my first published article ,”Everyman in Saddle Shoes” in Scholastic Teacher: I had assigned my East Lansing MI 10th graders a Paddy Chayefsky play, “The Catered Affair” and an Edward R. Murrow documentary, “Harvest of Shame”.

I even created a weekly TV series, ”Everyman Is a Critic,” on Michigan State’s new UHF channel. Each week a different pop topic: music, TV, fashion, hot rods et alia. Scholastic even appointed me radio TV editor to invent the one page “Teleguide” to make it more practical for teachers in the boondocks to assign TV sight unseen. I keyed them into Stephen Scheuer’s nationally syndicated series, TV Key. (Steve has deposited those scripts at Yale’s Beinecke and his TV interviews at Syracuse for future historians.) And I translated my Penn colleague Herbert Gans’ enlightened ideas about the edifiable sides of popular culture for teacher readers.

That annus mirabilis, 1955-56, brought me in contact with Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan and NBC’s Pat Weaver through the good services of Roy Larson whom I met cold at a White House conference on education. He was so beguiled by my plans that he set me up with an office at Time, Inc. that miraculously opened all doors. (It turned out he was on the Ford board that had given me my New York grant.) Weaver’s “Enlightenment Through Exposure” and Marshall’s “the medium is the message” were my shibboleths!

Alas, the both turned out to be false media prophets—a disillusionment that helped me devise more credible sources of meliorism in mass culture.

1 comment:

mcluhan prophecy said...

That annus mirabilis, 1955-56, brought me in contact with Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan and NBC’s Pat Weaver through the good services of Roy Larson.

Dear Glo,
55-56 would probably represent the end of Mc's original and fresh perceptions and it's prior to his celebrty. Of course you would have found him and his views energizing in a ways never heard of at UofD nor Wayne State or those 2 big 10's down the road. Maybe it's possible that the Jesuits founded as the Church's reaction to the Gutenberg revolution may have slipped you the real deal.

His decline as it were is complicated. And it's not so much as being wrong, but more like repeating himself and as Ted Carpenter put it, "The exuberant, witty rainmaker was now a wary, irritable jukebox reciting old phrases in random order."

Is your hostility founded on this then- an old man spent too soon or an actual rejection of his fundamental believe that the sensorium is tuned by our inventions?

And finally was Larson involved in giving Mc his Ford grant?