2025

‘SIXTIES SURREAL’ TEASES AT THE WHITNEY

(NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY 26 DECEMBER 2025)

 

 

In the section on society and media, a beautifully chosen trio of photos reveal, with the clarity of a Marshall McLuhan chapter, the very different realms of experience that the television was only beginning to melt together, as the country’s first generation of television viewers were entering adulthood.

Those images are a Diane Arbus of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, photographed from TV; another Arbus of a drive-in screen, displaying artificial clouds against the night sky; and then a Shawn Walker shot of a Tiffany’s window framed by its storefront, a screen to itself.

Private screen, public screen, real life — all visually one. How could a single body expect to inhabit them sanely? It couldn’t. And still can’t. Ever play Twister?

In the smartphone century, how prophetic this little trio of shots seems. It’s one of many reasons to see this show. Like the meddling teens in Scooby-Doo, its curators do us the favor, if also the occasional over-favor, of insisting on the human realities behind all the ghouls of this country’s crackup.

 

“A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

(25 February 2025)

by Ezra Klein

In 2016, when Donald Trump won for the first time, there was this self-published book by a former C.I.A. media analyst named Martin Gurri that became kind of a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. The book was called “The Revolt of the Public,” and it described how politics was changing because media and information had gone from scarce to abundant. This new informational dynamic creates constant recurrent crises for whoever is in power: The ability to control a narrative is gone. And in this world of fractured media, there is always an incentive and ability to show what is wrong with whoever is in power. Gurri argued that this dynamic is fundamentally unstable. It’s one that knows how to destroy but not how to build.

Gurri is a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, and he writes for The Free Press, Discourse magazine and City Journal, among others

Ezra Klein: Martin Gurri, welcome to the show.

Martin Gurri: Great to be here.

In 2014 you published this book, “The Revolt of the Public.” Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention, media and publics.

The argument of the book goes back to my days at C.I.A., where I had one of the least sexy jobs you could have. I was an analyst of global media, and it was a relatively straightforward job. If the president asked you: How are my policies playing in France? You went to two newspapers that were considered authoritative sources — that’s what we called them.

Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history. And there’s numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped. My first response, of course, as somebody who deals with authoritative information, was: What’s authoritative in this infinite mass of stuff? The second part was: What is the effect of going from a world where information is extremely valuable to one that is so abundant that you don’t know what it’s worth? We could track it. As different countries digitized, we could see ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence right behind it. So the book is trying to explain that. What became very clear was that the set of institutions that hold up modern life in the 21st century — the government, the media, business, academia — were shaped in the 20th century. Very top down, very hierarchical.

So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside the institutions. And it turned to the institutions, and the first one it turned to was media. It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media, which was the enemy. And sure enough, when that happens, you can find many errors and many mistakes, some bad faith, in the institutions. It’s institutional failure and elite failure that set the information agenda on the web. I mean, that’s pretty clear. It can be any number of things. But the total effect of that is a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions, which then builds up even stronger in this digital world that is noninstitutional.

I believe that the information structure is one of the most determinative factors in any society. It shapes the landscape. It’s an ecological force. So if you’re dealing with mass media, 20th-century style, it’s top down: You need to have a printing press or a TV station, which takes a certain kind of overhead and money. And you can’t talk back to it. So the mood of information — that’s Marshall McLuhan-ish —

Make my heart beat faster. [Laughs.]

Yeah. I’m a semi-McLuhanist. I think he was right on about a lot of things. And I think one of the things he was right about is that everything else is downstream from how we exchange information. Politics is downstream. Even culture is downstream. Because it gets exchanged in certain media. Now, I would say, in part, you’re right, that the rise of digital media just crashed into a world constructed around analog media and broke it to pieces. And there’s the question of how the digital media in and of itself stimulates controversy and hostility and uncovers a lot of negation toward the institutions that was almost certainly already there but was masked by that former top-down system — where, if The New York Times is talking down at you, you didn’t get or go to the comment section or on X and say, “New York Times, you’re wrong.” No, you just got to either throw it away or write a letter to the editor or something along those lines.

I think a lot of the hostility, a lot of the negation, a lot of what’s happened with the public is now a global phenomenon. We Americans are very provincial, but it’s by no means an American monopoly. This rise was there. It was just masked by the previous information system. And this information system stimulates it but also releases it.

• He Was Laughed Out of Academia for This Take About Technology. Turns Out He Was Right.

Marshall McLuhan was warning us about the internet long before it was invented.

SLATE MAGAZINE

By Nick Ripatrazone

July 28, 2025 5:40 AM

The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. “Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us,” he said during a television appearance. “At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.” That’s exactly what it feels like to spend time on TikTok or X—and was said by someone who died in 1980.

*  Trevor Quirk, “The Rupture,” New York Times Magazine (17 August 2025)

“It was early on a Friday last September when Hurricane Helene sawed through the Eastern Seabord, unleashing trillions of gallons of water over the Southern States. … Total disconnection was a defining experience across the region. Like many nearby neighborhoods and mountain towns, Warren Wilson College quickly reverted to something ‘primordial,’ a sort of commune where information was shared … ‘through oral traditions.’ … Natural disasters are foremost understood in terms of their material impact. … But in the 21^st century, these calamities also cleave through information networks, disconnecting vast regions from the media and communications. … Soon after Helene passed over North Carolina a NOAA satellite photographed the region at night. The picture revealed all the clots and axons of electric light that signal technological civilization. … But you could also see a wide plaque of darkness stretching between the Florida Panhandle and Virginia. … When I saw this image, I thought of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. He once described electric light as ‘pure information.’ … In the dark void captured by that satellite image, nearly every medium examined in McLuhan’s 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media,’ had been disabled. … Disasters can sever us … from what McLuhan called humanity’s ‘extended nervous system.’ … In western North Carolina, recovering from Helene felt like recapitulating the entire history of information, … racing from the ‘primordial’ back into modernity.”

*  Grant N. Havers, The Medium is Still the Message (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) 

The Medium Is Still the Message presents Marshall McLuhan, history’s foremost philosopher of media, as the indispensable guide for understanding the impact of technologies. McLuhan (1911-1980) shows that media are not simply tools of communication: they create new environments with transformational effects on politics, economics, culture, identity, religion, and nature. Grant N. Havers argues that McLuhan’s key insight–“the medium is the message”–is even more relevant today as humanity grapples with the unintended effects of new media.

As McLuhan demonstrated, a lack of understanding about the power of media technologies allows these entities to become idols that enslave their makers. At the same time, they encourage human beings to act like gods who can reinvent reality itself, all the while leading to the decline of literacy, the weakening of democracy, the resurgence of tribalism within the global village, and the elusive search for identity in cyberspace. The Medium Is Still the Message ultimately offers good news: using McLuhan’s insights, human beings can escape the technological cave that they have fashioned for themselves.

 *  William J. Buxton, The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine (U Alberta P, 2025)

 This new book recovers a path-breaking venture in museology from the late 1960s that has largely gone unnoticed. In 1967, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his collaborator Harley Parker, pioneer of museum exhibit design, were invited by the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) to moderate a two-day seminar on museum communication attended by leading museum officials from around the state and further afield. The seminar report, originally published in 1969, captures the extent to which the audacious views of McLuhan and Parker on rethinking the museum were greeted with puzzlement, scepticism, and consternation by those in attendance. In their view, “the monolithic nature of the museum itself—print-orientation and linear sequential patterns” hamstrung efforts to reform it. Drawing on extensive archival sources, William J. Buxton sheds light on the context of the seminar, its main participants and organizers, its funding, and its reception. Also included is an essay on Parker and his close working relationship with McLuhan by Gary Genosko, and another on multi-sensory museology and the overall significance of the seminar today by David Howes. Charting connections to the Our World TV broadcast of June 1967, Expo 67, and the contemporaneous Electric Circus in Manhattan, this exciting work demonstrates the importance of this period of McLuhan’s thought, his collaborations with Parker, and the cluster of work published between 1967 and 1972. The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine makes a unique contribution to McLuhan scholarship, cultural history, and museum history in the late 1960s.

*  Jacqueline McLeod Rogers, ed., Crises Then as Now: Marshall McLuhan, with Urbanist Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Artist Gyorgy Kepes (Peter Lang, 2025)

This book explores how Marshall McLuhan, with urbanist Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and artist György Kepes, responded to crises in the 60s and 70s similar to what we now face: human-to-human violence on a planetary scale, carving inequities and fomented by arms and mediation; catastrophic human to non-human relations, with human activity sparking irreversible (and accelerating) environmental degradation; imbalanced human-to-machine relations, with computational decision-making outstripping human intervention.

McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, and Kepes called for redesign to stimulate sensory engagement and participation. Merging art and science knowledge was requisite to creating counter environments and livable futures and allowing humans to work with (rather than under or over) machines. Placed in dialogue, the three figures map out paths of hope as well as danger zones – geographies that speak to our present as we grapple with the role of technology in infrastructure and environment, art and culture.

*  Gary Genosko, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum (U Alberta P, 2025)

This is the first book about the life and work of Harley Parker (1915-1992), Canadian museum exhibition designer, typographer, and painter. As friend and collaborator of media luminary Marshall McLuhan, Parker’s influence extended far beyond the realm of art. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Genosko shows that Parker’s unique perspective on museums is based on his application of McLuhan’s medium theory to exhibition design. His emphasis on the role of the senses anticipated much of contemporary sensory studies, which will bring his work into focus for a new generation of scholars. A highlight of Parker’s career as Head of General Display at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (1957-1968) was his Hall of Invertebrate Fossils, which opened to considerable acclaim in early 1967. That same year he mounted a multimedia gallery at the Museum of the City of New York. These milestones underscore Parker’s profound impact on museum studies and communication theory. Central to this comprehensive study is the rediscovery of Parker’s lost manuscript, The Culture Box, which would have confirmed his role as a central figure in the Toronto School of Communication had it not been lost for some fifty years. Scholars in communication, cultural, and museum studies will benefit from this exploration of Parker’s thought, as will those interested in sensory studies and the enduring value of McLuhan’s ideas.

*  Harley Parker (ed. Gary Genosko), The Culture Box: Museums as Media (U Alberta P, 2025)

In The Culture Box, Harley Parker applies Marshall McLuhan’s medium theory to the museum, analyzes the museum as the site of many media, and specifies the ways in which designer-communicators can engage in inter-sense design to connect audiences and artifacts. Parker argues that museums should retrain the sensory perception of visitors and foster cultural engagement, participation, and empathy. In order to accomplish this, he recommends the construction of what he calls a “new centre,” emphasizing both “new” and “news,” a small “newseum” which would engender discussion and debate. Parker envisions these centres being constructed adjacent to any existing large prestige museum and containing three exhibits: a current public exhibit, an exhibit in process, and an area for gathering materials for a forthcoming exhibit. This critical edition of The Culture Box revives Parker’s unpublished manuscript, one that promised to be a key contribution to the Toronto School of Communication before it was lost for some fifty years and then recently discovered by Parker’s daughter, Margaret Parker. Gary Genosko presents an overview of the book’s leading ideas and provides annotations outlining Parker’s source materials and the salient texts by Marshall McLuhan and others. Scholars in communication, media, and curatorial studies will benefit from Parker’s book, as will those interested in sensory design and McLuhan studies.

Jacob Weisberg, “Algorithm Nation,” The New York Review of Books (23 October 2025): review of Renée di Resta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality; Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter; and Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattned Culture.

The algorithm has become, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, the dominant medium of the digital age. The way it selects, curates, and presents information shapes our perspectives on the world in ways comparable to earlier information technologies like the printing press, radio, and television. Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, sees this transformation as negative, but his concern isn’t that algorithms are isolating us in separate bubbles. The problem , as he sees it, is the opposite: they’re breeding homogeneity in taste, subjecting us all to an increasingly insipid wallpaper culture.