of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
A strange thing happened in San Francisco sixty years ago. A festival was being held in honor of a Canadian professor of English literature and poetry by the name of Marshall McLuhan. He was about to become a household name, a "media guru," and a public intellectual before public intellectuals were a thing.
But this unlikely fame wasn't by accident; it was by design. One of the top ad men of the day, the so-called "Socrates of San Francisco," Howard Luck Gossage, made it his business to turn this Canadian professor into a celebrity commentator on culture and technology.
"Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?" According to lore, that was Gossage's winning line when he telephoned Marshall McLuhan at his home in Toronto. A short while earlier, Gossage's partner Gerry Feigen (implausibly but actually a proctologist and amateur ventriloquist) had given Gossage a copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which McGraw-Hill in New York City had just released, and was causing a bit of a stir. Feigen felt this was right up Gossage's alley, and he was right.
Howard Gossage was not your average ad man of the day. His motto was "changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man." He led pro bono campaigns to stop a proposed flooding of the Grand Canyon, among other mad if laudable capers, and he decided that the world desperately needed Marshall McLuhan. Gossage set out to bring Marshall McLuhan to the world in a way that only a mad ad man of the 1960s could.
A Plan for Mass Recognition
Gossage had a three-part plan to make McLuhan famous.
The first step was getting McLuhan on board. That was probably not difficult. I can only imagine his reply when Howard asked him if he'd like to be ceremoniously catapulted to fame.
McLuhan was not your average English professor. To myth-bust a bit, he was not unknown at the time. He was already an established literary critic and widely published expert on modernist poetry and literature. By the time Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man came out in 1964, McLuhan was already well-known outside of English departments (if mainly still within academia) as a communications expert. In the 1950s, the group he formed with colleague Edmund Carpenter had published an acclaimed journal, Explorations, whose pages gathered a star-studded interdisciplinary team to probe the frontiers of media studies. His 1962-published book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, won him a Governor General's Medal for Non-Fiction.
Gossage played a significant role in bringing McLuhan from the classroom to the press room, and from there to corporate boardrooms and living rooms worldwide.
The next step in Gossage's plan was to bring McLuhan front and center to the press. To do that successfully, he had to spend some money. He flew McLuhan from Toronto and himself from San Francisco, threw some parties, bought some dinners and plenty of cocktails, and essentially set McLuhan loose on journalists, literati, and taste makers.
Of course, this is not an automatic formula for success. You can't just wine and dine journalists and expect them to do your bidding. You need a hook, a magic ingredient: you need a McLuhan.
McLuhan was always the key. An elocutionist mother and a storytelling father influenced his upbringing. He had encyclopedic knowledge. Charisma and humour. A sense of aphorism and poetry. Lightning-quick wit. Gravitas.
"Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb—with these pronouncements, 'art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age'—with all of this Nietzschean certitude, McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West."
[Tom Wolfe, "What If He Is Right," 1965]
Gossage was selling McLuhan hard, and Wolfe was devouring him whole. To be sure, Gossage was talking McLuhan up. But remarkably, McLuhan lived up to the hype.
A Festival Orchestrates Legacy
The last part of the "Make McLuhan Famous" plan, which all the PR was leading to, was an event that took place between August 9-12, 1965. It was The Marshall McLuhan Festival in San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote of it following breakfast at an unlikely location near Gossage's office, which was at 451 Pacific Avenue in the North Beach neighbourhood, an old firehouse that was ground zero for all this activity. (The old firehouse was reportedly acquired recently by Jony Ive, who is rumoured to be buying up the entire neighbourhood and is unlikely aware of the remarkable history oozing from its striking facade.) In its heyday, the firehouse was host to a remarkable mix of advertisers, marketers, academics, and intellectuals. Many of the most interesting people in San Francisco in the mid-60s came through.
"* * *FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of "The Mechanical Bride," "The Gutenburg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media," darling of the critics ("Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic" – New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands "at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies."
Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, "Where is the last place in town you'd expect to see Marshall McLuhan?" and that's where I found him–at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen."
[Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965]
You read that right. It was 1965, and having a business breakfast at a topless restaurant was perfectly reasonable.
The Marshall McLuhan Festival was designed to be an extra-long weekend of parties and events, created by Gossage and Company, to shine a bright light on Marshall McLuhan. Invited were all the A-list people, journalists, and business executives who could be mustered in an attempt to launch McLuhan. And it was about as successful as could be hoped.
For the rest of the 1960s, McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His face and voice and “message” appeared in or on the world's magazines, newspapers, televisions, and radios. He spoke to public audiences and private corporations. He authored and co-authored articles and books.
And through it all, he held down his day job teaching literature and poetry at St. Michael's College in Toronto.
If there's one lesson in this, there's a dozen. And indeed some of the lessons are cautionary, of the "be careful what you wish for" type.
Gossage did what he set out to do. He turned a professor into a celebrity. But it's important to note that he did it for unselfish reasons. He was a humanitarian, a true believer. He believed the world needed to know McLuhan, and he made it happen in a somewhat spectacular fashion. I would wager it succeeded beyond his hopes, and it amused him to no end that it actually worked.
Gossage tried it again with Professor Leopold Kohr. The fact that you probably have never heard of Kohr speaks volumes. A message is not enough. PR is not enough. Even timing isn't everything, though it's a lot. It does seem to come down to the messenger, or the medium, as it were.
Andrew McLuhan, a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, created The McLuhan Institute in 2017 to preserve and continue his family's tradition in exploring the nature of technologies and their effects on people and culture. He writes, lectures, and consults widely.
A strange thing happened in San Francisco sixty years ago. A festival was being held in honor of a Canadian professor of English literature and poetry by the name of Marshall McLuhan. He was about to become a household name, a "media guru," and a public intellectual before public intellectuals were a thing.
But this unlikely fame wasn't by accident; it was by design. One of the top ad men of the day, the so-called "Socrates of San Francisco," Howard Luck Gossage, made it his business to turn this Canadian professor into a celebrity commentator on culture and technology.
"Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?" According to lore, that was Gossage's winning line when he telephoned Marshall McLuhan at his home in Toronto. A short while earlier, Gossage's partner Gerry Feigen (implausibly but actually a proctologist and amateur ventriloquist) had given Gossage a copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which McGraw-Hill in New York City had just released, and was causing a bit of a stir. Feigen felt this was right up Gossage's alley, and he was right.
Howard Gossage was not your average ad man of the day. His motto was "changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man." He led pro bono campaigns to stop a proposed flooding of the Grand Canyon, among other mad if laudable capers, and he decided that the world desperately needed Marshall McLuhan. Gossage set out to bring Marshall McLuhan to the world in a way that only a mad ad man of the 1960s could.
A Plan for Mass Recognition
Gossage had a three-part plan to make McLuhan famous.
The first step was getting McLuhan on board. That was probably not difficult. I can only imagine his reply when Howard asked him if he'd like to be ceremoniously catapulted to fame.
McLuhan was not your average English professor. To myth-bust a bit, he was not unknown at the time. He was already an established literary critic and widely published expert on modernist poetry and literature. By the time Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man came out in 1964, McLuhan was already well-known outside of English departments (if mainly still within academia) as a communications expert. In the 1950s, the group he formed with colleague Edmund Carpenter had published an acclaimed journal, Explorations, whose pages gathered a star-studded interdisciplinary team to probe the frontiers of media studies. His 1962-published book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, won him a Governor General's Medal for Non-Fiction.
Gossage played a significant role in bringing McLuhan from the classroom to the press room, and from there to corporate boardrooms and living rooms worldwide.
The next step in Gossage's plan was to bring McLuhan front and center to the press. To do that successfully, he had to spend some money. He flew McLuhan from Toronto and himself from San Francisco, threw some parties, bought some dinners and plenty of cocktails, and essentially set McLuhan loose on journalists, literati, and taste makers.
Of course, this is not an automatic formula for success. You can't just wine and dine journalists and expect them to do your bidding. You need a hook, a magic ingredient: you need a McLuhan.
McLuhan was always the key. An elocutionist mother and a storytelling father influenced his upbringing. He had encyclopedic knowledge. Charisma and humour. A sense of aphorism and poetry. Lightning-quick wit. Gravitas.
"Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb—with these pronouncements, 'art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age'—with all of this Nietzschean certitude, McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West."
[Tom Wolfe, "What If He Is Right," 1965]
Gossage was selling McLuhan hard, and Wolfe was devouring him whole. To be sure, Gossage was talking McLuhan up. But remarkably, McLuhan lived up to the hype.
A Festival Orchestrates Legacy
The last part of the "Make McLuhan Famous" plan, which all the PR was leading to, was an event that took place between August 9-12, 1965. It was The Marshall McLuhan Festival in San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote of it following breakfast at an unlikely location near Gossage's office, which was at 451 Pacific Avenue in the North Beach neighbourhood, an old firehouse that was ground zero for all this activity. (The old firehouse was reportedly acquired recently by Jony Ive, who is rumoured to be buying up the entire neighbourhood and is unlikely aware of the remarkable history oozing from its striking facade.) In its heyday, the firehouse was host to a remarkable mix of advertisers, marketers, academics, and intellectuals. Many of the most interesting people in San Francisco in the mid-60s came through.
"* * *FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of "The Mechanical Bride," "The Gutenburg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media," darling of the critics ("Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic" – New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands "at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies."
Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, "Where is the last place in town you'd expect to see Marshall McLuhan?" and that's where I found him–at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen."
[Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965]
You read that right. It was 1965, and having a business breakfast at a topless restaurant was perfectly reasonable.
The Marshall McLuhan Festival was designed to be an extra-long weekend of parties and events, created by Gossage and Company, to shine a bright light on Marshall McLuhan. Invited were all the A-list people, journalists, and business executives who could be mustered in an attempt to launch McLuhan. And it was about as successful as could be hoped.
For the rest of the 1960s, McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His face and voice and “message” appeared in or on the world's magazines, newspapers, televisions, and radios. He spoke to public audiences and private corporations. He authored and co-authored articles and books.
And through it all, he held down his day job teaching literature and poetry at St. Michael's College in Toronto.
If there's one lesson in this, there's a dozen. And indeed some of the lessons are cautionary, of the "be careful what you wish for" type.
Gossage did what he set out to do. He turned a professor into a celebrity. But it's important to note that he did it for unselfish reasons. He was a humanitarian, a true believer. He believed the world needed to know McLuhan, and he made it happen in a somewhat spectacular fashion. I would wager it succeeded beyond his hopes, and it amused him to no end that it actually worked.
Gossage tried it again with Professor Leopold Kohr. The fact that you probably have never heard of Kohr speaks volumes. A message is not enough. PR is not enough. Even timing isn't everything, though it's a lot. It does seem to come down to the messenger, or the medium, as it were.
Andrew McLuhan, a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, created The McLuhan Institute in 2017 to preserve and continue his family's tradition in exploring the nature of technologies and their effects on people and culture. He writes, lectures, and consults widely.
A strange thing happened in San Francisco sixty years ago. A festival was being held in honor of a Canadian professor of English literature and poetry by the name of Marshall McLuhan. He was about to become a household name, a "media guru," and a public intellectual before public intellectuals were a thing.
But this unlikely fame wasn't by accident; it was by design. One of the top ad men of the day, the so-called "Socrates of San Francisco," Howard Luck Gossage, made it his business to turn this Canadian professor into a celebrity commentator on culture and technology.
"Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?" According to lore, that was Gossage's winning line when he telephoned Marshall McLuhan at his home in Toronto. A short while earlier, Gossage's partner Gerry Feigen (implausibly but actually a proctologist and amateur ventriloquist) had given Gossage a copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which McGraw-Hill in New York City had just released, and was causing a bit of a stir. Feigen felt this was right up Gossage's alley, and he was right.
Howard Gossage was not your average ad man of the day. His motto was "changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man." He led pro bono campaigns to stop a proposed flooding of the Grand Canyon, among other mad if laudable capers, and he decided that the world desperately needed Marshall McLuhan. Gossage set out to bring Marshall McLuhan to the world in a way that only a mad ad man of the 1960s could.
A Plan for Mass Recognition
Gossage had a three-part plan to make McLuhan famous.
The first step was getting McLuhan on board. That was probably not difficult. I can only imagine his reply when Howard asked him if he'd like to be ceremoniously catapulted to fame.
McLuhan was not your average English professor. To myth-bust a bit, he was not unknown at the time. He was already an established literary critic and widely published expert on modernist poetry and literature. By the time Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man came out in 1964, McLuhan was already well-known outside of English departments (if mainly still within academia) as a communications expert. In the 1950s, the group he formed with colleague Edmund Carpenter had published an acclaimed journal, Explorations, whose pages gathered a star-studded interdisciplinary team to probe the frontiers of media studies. His 1962-published book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, won him a Governor General's Medal for Non-Fiction.
Gossage played a significant role in bringing McLuhan from the classroom to the press room, and from there to corporate boardrooms and living rooms worldwide.
The next step in Gossage's plan was to bring McLuhan front and center to the press. To do that successfully, he had to spend some money. He flew McLuhan from Toronto and himself from San Francisco, threw some parties, bought some dinners and plenty of cocktails, and essentially set McLuhan loose on journalists, literati, and taste makers.
Of course, this is not an automatic formula for success. You can't just wine and dine journalists and expect them to do your bidding. You need a hook, a magic ingredient: you need a McLuhan.
McLuhan was always the key. An elocutionist mother and a storytelling father influenced his upbringing. He had encyclopedic knowledge. Charisma and humour. A sense of aphorism and poetry. Lightning-quick wit. Gravitas.
"Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb—with these pronouncements, 'art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age'—with all of this Nietzschean certitude, McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West."
[Tom Wolfe, "What If He Is Right," 1965]
Gossage was selling McLuhan hard, and Wolfe was devouring him whole. To be sure, Gossage was talking McLuhan up. But remarkably, McLuhan lived up to the hype.
A Festival Orchestrates Legacy
The last part of the "Make McLuhan Famous" plan, which all the PR was leading to, was an event that took place between August 9-12, 1965. It was The Marshall McLuhan Festival in San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote of it following breakfast at an unlikely location near Gossage's office, which was at 451 Pacific Avenue in the North Beach neighbourhood, an old firehouse that was ground zero for all this activity. (The old firehouse was reportedly acquired recently by Jony Ive, who is rumoured to be buying up the entire neighbourhood and is unlikely aware of the remarkable history oozing from its striking facade.) In its heyday, the firehouse was host to a remarkable mix of advertisers, marketers, academics, and intellectuals. Many of the most interesting people in San Francisco in the mid-60s came through.
"* * *FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of "The Mechanical Bride," "The Gutenburg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media," darling of the critics ("Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic" – New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands "at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies."
Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, "Where is the last place in town you'd expect to see Marshall McLuhan?" and that's where I found him–at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen."
[Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965]
You read that right. It was 1965, and having a business breakfast at a topless restaurant was perfectly reasonable.
The Marshall McLuhan Festival was designed to be an extra-long weekend of parties and events, created by Gossage and Company, to shine a bright light on Marshall McLuhan. Invited were all the A-list people, journalists, and business executives who could be mustered in an attempt to launch McLuhan. And it was about as successful as could be hoped.
For the rest of the 1960s, McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His face and voice and “message” appeared in or on the world's magazines, newspapers, televisions, and radios. He spoke to public audiences and private corporations. He authored and co-authored articles and books.
And through it all, he held down his day job teaching literature and poetry at St. Michael's College in Toronto.
If there's one lesson in this, there's a dozen. And indeed some of the lessons are cautionary, of the "be careful what you wish for" type.
Gossage did what he set out to do. He turned a professor into a celebrity. But it's important to note that he did it for unselfish reasons. He was a humanitarian, a true believer. He believed the world needed to know McLuhan, and he made it happen in a somewhat spectacular fashion. I would wager it succeeded beyond his hopes, and it amused him to no end that it actually worked.
Gossage tried it again with Professor Leopold Kohr. The fact that you probably have never heard of Kohr speaks volumes. A message is not enough. PR is not enough. Even timing isn't everything, though it's a lot. It does seem to come down to the messenger, or the medium, as it were.
Andrew McLuhan, a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, created The McLuhan Institute in 2017 to preserve and continue his family's tradition in exploring the nature of technologies and their effects on people and culture. He writes, lectures, and consults widely.
A strange thing happened in San Francisco sixty years ago. A festival was being held in honor of a Canadian professor of English literature and poetry by the name of Marshall McLuhan. He was about to become a household name, a "media guru," and a public intellectual before public intellectuals were a thing.
But this unlikely fame wasn't by accident; it was by design. One of the top ad men of the day, the so-called "Socrates of San Francisco," Howard Luck Gossage, made it his business to turn this Canadian professor into a celebrity commentator on culture and technology.
"Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?" According to lore, that was Gossage's winning line when he telephoned Marshall McLuhan at his home in Toronto. A short while earlier, Gossage's partner Gerry Feigen (implausibly but actually a proctologist and amateur ventriloquist) had given Gossage a copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which McGraw-Hill in New York City had just released, and was causing a bit of a stir. Feigen felt this was right up Gossage's alley, and he was right.
Howard Gossage was not your average ad man of the day. His motto was "changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man." He led pro bono campaigns to stop a proposed flooding of the Grand Canyon, among other mad if laudable capers, and he decided that the world desperately needed Marshall McLuhan. Gossage set out to bring Marshall McLuhan to the world in a way that only a mad ad man of the 1960s could.
A Plan for Mass Recognition
Gossage had a three-part plan to make McLuhan famous.
The first step was getting McLuhan on board. That was probably not difficult. I can only imagine his reply when Howard asked him if he'd like to be ceremoniously catapulted to fame.
McLuhan was not your average English professor. To myth-bust a bit, he was not unknown at the time. He was already an established literary critic and widely published expert on modernist poetry and literature. By the time Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man came out in 1964, McLuhan was already well-known outside of English departments (if mainly still within academia) as a communications expert. In the 1950s, the group he formed with colleague Edmund Carpenter had published an acclaimed journal, Explorations, whose pages gathered a star-studded interdisciplinary team to probe the frontiers of media studies. His 1962-published book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, won him a Governor General's Medal for Non-Fiction.
Gossage played a significant role in bringing McLuhan from the classroom to the press room, and from there to corporate boardrooms and living rooms worldwide.
The next step in Gossage's plan was to bring McLuhan front and center to the press. To do that successfully, he had to spend some money. He flew McLuhan from Toronto and himself from San Francisco, threw some parties, bought some dinners and plenty of cocktails, and essentially set McLuhan loose on journalists, literati, and taste makers.
Of course, this is not an automatic formula for success. You can't just wine and dine journalists and expect them to do your bidding. You need a hook, a magic ingredient: you need a McLuhan.
McLuhan was always the key. An elocutionist mother and a storytelling father influenced his upbringing. He had encyclopedic knowledge. Charisma and humour. A sense of aphorism and poetry. Lightning-quick wit. Gravitas.
"Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb—with these pronouncements, 'art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age'—with all of this Nietzschean certitude, McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West."
[Tom Wolfe, "What If He Is Right," 1965]
Gossage was selling McLuhan hard, and Wolfe was devouring him whole. To be sure, Gossage was talking McLuhan up. But remarkably, McLuhan lived up to the hype.
A Festival Orchestrates Legacy
The last part of the "Make McLuhan Famous" plan, which all the PR was leading to, was an event that took place between August 9-12, 1965. It was The Marshall McLuhan Festival in San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote of it following breakfast at an unlikely location near Gossage's office, which was at 451 Pacific Avenue in the North Beach neighbourhood, an old firehouse that was ground zero for all this activity. (The old firehouse was reportedly acquired recently by Jony Ive, who is rumoured to be buying up the entire neighbourhood and is unlikely aware of the remarkable history oozing from its striking facade.) In its heyday, the firehouse was host to a remarkable mix of advertisers, marketers, academics, and intellectuals. Many of the most interesting people in San Francisco in the mid-60s came through.
"* * *FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of "The Mechanical Bride," "The Gutenburg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media," darling of the critics ("Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic" – New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands "at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies."
Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, "Where is the last place in town you'd expect to see Marshall McLuhan?" and that's where I found him–at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen."
[Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965]
You read that right. It was 1965, and having a business breakfast at a topless restaurant was perfectly reasonable.
The Marshall McLuhan Festival was designed to be an extra-long weekend of parties and events, created by Gossage and Company, to shine a bright light on Marshall McLuhan. Invited were all the A-list people, journalists, and business executives who could be mustered in an attempt to launch McLuhan. And it was about as successful as could be hoped.
For the rest of the 1960s, McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His face and voice and “message” appeared in or on the world's magazines, newspapers, televisions, and radios. He spoke to public audiences and private corporations. He authored and co-authored articles and books.
And through it all, he held down his day job teaching literature and poetry at St. Michael's College in Toronto.
If there's one lesson in this, there's a dozen. And indeed some of the lessons are cautionary, of the "be careful what you wish for" type.
Gossage did what he set out to do. He turned a professor into a celebrity. But it's important to note that he did it for unselfish reasons. He was a humanitarian, a true believer. He believed the world needed to know McLuhan, and he made it happen in a somewhat spectacular fashion. I would wager it succeeded beyond his hopes, and it amused him to no end that it actually worked.
Gossage tried it again with Professor Leopold Kohr. The fact that you probably have never heard of Kohr speaks volumes. A message is not enough. PR is not enough. Even timing isn't everything, though it's a lot. It does seem to come down to the messenger, or the medium, as it were.
Andrew McLuhan, a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, created The McLuhan Institute in 2017 to preserve and continue his family's tradition in exploring the nature of technologies and their effects on people and culture. He writes, lectures, and consults widely.
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