Cavell on the Spatial McLuhan

Paper Summary:

Richard Cavell tackles one of the all-time greats of communication theory in his article on "McLuhan and Spatial Communication." The paper explains that Marshall McLuhan was one of the great prophets (some would say charlatans) of early communication theory. For a long time he was one of one of the only celebrities of the field and toured wildly to give his opinions on the subject. They were certainly opinions worth hearing, for he had some remarkably new and insightful things to say about media, communication, and the way in which technology affects human development. The paper shows, however, that within the scope of his own lifetime, he went from spokesman to outcast and academia widely turned against him. Before his death his saw the school he had founded shut down and his work widely discredited. Since the rise of the Internet, however, the development of other, new forms of entertainment and media, McLuhanism has enjoyed something of an academic comeback. It is with this background in mind that the paper approaches Cavell's work on McLuhan, for much of his essay deals with presenting an explanation for McLuhan's disenfranchisement from and eventual re-adoption by the academic community. According to Cavell's central thesis, McLuhan's anomalous position and his lasting durability within the field of communications theory both spring from his "elaboration of a spatial model of communication... based on the notion of acoustic space... situated within the spatial bias of postmodernist thought."

From the Paper:

"Cavell's failure to bring up the way in which McLuhan's theories on space have been substantiated through current technological advances is an important one. Cavell explains in great length the way that McLuhan's theories draw from the history of technological development to explain the development of various forms of consciousness and space. Yet in explaining McLuhan's continued relevance, he somehow fails to take the logical step and relate McLuhan's dynamic space to what is today commonly called "cyberspace." Many theorists of the digital revolution look to McLuhan as one of the greatest prophets and thinkers of the Internet Revolution, having discussed its many complications and impacts years before it even existed. Paul Levinson explains that it is the Internet, not TV, that best fulfills the role of the media in creating the acoustic space described by McLuhan."

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