William J. Buxton, The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine: A 1967 New York City Seminar featuring Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 2026), with essays by Gary Genosko and David Howes

While the work of Marshall McLuhan continues to attract considerable attention, one of his most notable contributions has largely been overlooked. It took the form of the prominent role he played co-moderating (with Harley Parker) a seminar attended by over eighty persons examining the communication of museums with their publics on October 9 and 10, 1967. Under the auspices of the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) and funded primarily by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), it was held largely at the premises of the Museum on Fifth Avenue. The report occupies a unique place with the vast ouvres of Marshall McLuhan. Rather than having something written or said by McLuhan in isolation from others as its point of reference, the report is entirely based on McLuhan in dialogue with a broad range of interlocutors; he participated in these dialogues largely as part of a dyad formed with Harley Parker. Indeed, one could argue that it was Parker rather than McLuhan who did most of the heavy lifting for the seminar. This involved not only its planning and the delivery of its summation, but also picking up the slack when McLuhan fell ill early on. The report also sheds considerable light on the state of museology in mid-century America. It was the stated goal of McLuhan and Parker to disrupt conventional museological practices and to raise questions about the deeply held beliefs of museum officials. The planners of the seminar believed that those working in museums could benefit from exposure to the ideas of the two moderators. But by inviting Jacques Barzun to deliver the final address—largely challenging the views of Parker and McLuhan—this meant that the status quo could emerge from the seminar unscathed and that the feathers of the museum elite would largely remain unruffled.

The Orality Theory of Everything

The decline of reading and the rise of social media are again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person.

By Derek Thompson

THE ATLANTIC     February 22, 2026

The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.

My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person.

Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?

Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99 percent of everything. I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before, really, the written word, or certainly before mass literacy.

Weisenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was, per se, communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.

[T]he ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm.