My Life With Marshall McLuhan
I first met Marshall when I was in high school, at a Couchiching Conference. A friend of my father’s was on a panel and introduced me to him. I explained that my father was an executive of the Toronto Star and that I wanted to study with him. Marshall was happy to oblige. As soon as I was accepted to the University of Toronto, he said, I should come down to the Coach House and arrange to see him. I think I was in Grade 10 at the time, though I am not entirely sure.
What Marshall did was not exactly teach. He gave you, as I once described it in a 1994 collection of remembrances, a “do-it-yourself kit.” He saved me tremendous amounts of time by forcing me out of my old mode of thinking. I had been looking at figures rather than looking for patterns. I had been classifying everything without considering the effects of the new environment. Marshall exposed that environment for me. Once you have seen it, you cannot un-see it. That is both the gift and the burden.
I read the news differently after that. I stopped taking things at face value. I started reading between the lines, noticing that “news” had to have certain characteristics in order to sell ads, and that those characteristics had very little to do with facts. I was very interested in the JFK assassination at the time, and I wanted to test Marshall to see whether he was a dupe of the official story. To my great satisfaction, when I told him about my discussions with Mr. Penn Jones, Marshall cut me off immediately and said, well, it was the Establishment who killed him. From that moment on, I knew that this man was not a tool of the owners of the system.
From then on, I followed Marshall’s method: begin by exploring the sensory effects of any process of communication on its audience, not its content. I started to look at the newspaper as more of a story book than a science text. That one shift, alone, was worth the price of admission.
Eventually I began to provide a service to Marshall, clipping newspaper articles in which he was mentioned, which I retrieved daily from the Librarian at the Toronto Star. So I began assisting Marshall in the role of an archivist without having been formally appointed. He never appointed me at first, but after I slid into the role it suited him and me. It suited him because I had begun reading at a very young age. By the time I left high school I could read three to four thousand words a day with over ninety-five percent retention, and my teachers said I had a photographic memory. I had also taken speed-reading courses in high school, which qualified me further for the work. One of my first jobs while still in school was working for Walter Williston, organizing over six hundred exhibits as his archivist while presiding with him in the Ontario Supreme Court in 1975. Marshall realized that I could regurgitate his articles from memory, and that made me invaluable to him. I planned to get hold of everything he had ever written. My own father had been a professor at the University of Toronto and had me reading daily before I was two years old, so by the time Marshall and I started working together, I had been training for the job my entire life without knowing it.
It was a relationship that grew, the way most things did around Marshall. When I was accepted to the University of Toronto in a letter that arrived in March of 1971, Marshall told me that he was no longer teaching undergraduates. So I dropped out, audited all his classes, took the tests and the exams, and completed my undergraduate degree at night school. Years later I registered and began preparing to earn a Ph.D. It was always interesting to Marshall that his first Ph.D. student was named Donald Theall and his last Ph.D. student was Nelson Thall. The only difference was the letter E. Marshall used to tell Don that the E stood for the Electric world. He laughed at that and said there was some serendipity or providence in it that he wanted to discover.
[Photo: Nelson and Don Theall at Don’s home office in Peterborough]
After his passing I helped put together what we called the McLuhan Funfare at the Coach House, a brief gathering of the people who had been in his orbit. Later I directed the think tank division of the McLuhan Centre for Global Communications in Toronto, which his family established to keep the work alive. Later still, in 1995, I became Research Director of the McLuhan Centre for Media Sciences of Toronto, which was created for me by Mr. Barrington Nevitt, a close associate of Marshall’s who co-wrote Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. I have spent the years since in the same line of work, trying to understand the relationship between communications, technology, and culture, and trying to explain it to anyone who will listen.
Part of that work has been applying McLuhan’s Laws of Media to business. In 1985 I was employed to develop a plan for the Toronto Star to survive the coming revolution: the Internet, or what at the time McLuhan described as Global Media Networking. I used McLuhan’s theory to personally redesign the Toronto Star. The plan called for new presses and for turning the newspaper into a TV-like newspaper instead of the book-like newspaper it had been. The Star built a new plant, and it opened in 1992. The Tetrad analysis had teeth. The theory worked in practice. The redesign was a success, and it put me on the Board of the Star.
In 1998 I joined the Board of Stan Lee Media Inc. I convinced Stan that the McLuhan media theory predicted that the first film he should present to the public, out of all his characters, was Spider-Man, not Captain America or the X-Men. I sat down for a few months and used the same Tetrad analysis to choose the plot the theory predicted would be the most eyeball-sticky. It became a huge success. Production began in early 2001, and the film opened in theaters in May 2002.
[Photo: Nelson and Stan Lee — if available]
The journalist Stephen Dale, writing in his book McLuhan’s Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media, was generous enough to say that I “can retrieve a McLuhan aphorism about as effortlessly as a country pastor can bring a Biblical quotation to his lips.” I will accept the compliment.
When I look at a new technology, I do not ask what it is for. I ask what it is doing to us. That is a McLuhan habit. He gave it to me, and I have not been able to give it back.
I tell you all of this not to puff myself up. I tell you because the field of McLuhan studies is now full of people who have read the books, written the dissertations, and never spent a single hour in a room with the man. That is not a criticism of them. Marshall has been gone for over forty-five years, and the books are what we have.
But there is a difference between studying a thinker and being shaped by one, and that difference matters when the subject is somebody whose entire method was about training perception. You cannot get perceptual training from a footnote. You have to sit beside someone and watch them notice things, and then try to notice them too.
So far as I know, outside of Marshall’s own children, there are very few of us left who worked directly with him in those final years and are still doing this work. That is not a boast. It is closer to a responsibility.
I am writing this book with Pam Killeen, an accomplished writer, because the time is short and the message is urgent, and because Marshall once told me that the artist’s job is to be a lifeline to tomorrow. I am a witness. And what I witnessed needs to get to you before the noise of the present drowns it out.
The Coach House
Anyone who knew Marshall in the years before he died knew the Coach House. It sat behind 39A Queen’s Park Crescent in Toronto, on the grounds of the University of Toronto, and it was the headquarters of the Centre for Culture and Technology, which Marshall had founded in 1963. From the outside it looked like what it was: a converted carriage house, modest, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. From the inside it was something else entirely. It was the place where Marshall did his thinking out loud, in front of anyone who happened to be there.
[Nelson, this is where you describe what it actually felt like to walk in. The smell of the place. Where Marshall sat. What was on the walls. Who else was usually there. A reader who’s never been inside the Coach House needs a sensory image, and only you can give them one. Three or four sentences of physical detail will do more here than three pages of theory.]
What I remember most about those rooms is that Marshall did not only lecture in them. He probed. He would throw out a phrase, perhaps a line from Joyce, perhaps a clipping from that morning’s Globe and Mail, perhaps a complaint about something his wife Corinne had said at breakfast, and then watch what happened in the room.
[Nelson, a specific story here would land hard. One conversation. One day. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. The smaller the moment, the truer it tends to feel on the page. Maybe the first time Marshall said something to you that genuinely rearranged your thinking, or the first time he seemed to listen to something you said and take it seriously.]
The Archive
When Marshall died in December of 1980, the Coach House did not stop running, but the engine that drove it was gone. There were boxes everywhere: letters, manuscripts, marginalia, drafts of books that had never been finished, drafts of books that had been finished and then taken apart and started over. Marshall was not a tidy archivist of his own work. He was a thinker, and thinkers leave a mess behind them.
I did not set out to become his chief archivist. The work found me. Mrs. Stewart, his secretary, showed me an index of his writings. Sometimes Marshall had published an article in an academic journal at Saint Louis University and she had no copy of what he had sent out. I would fly down myself, walk into the library with a note from him, make a copy, and bring it back to Marshall’s office. Somebody had to sort through what was there, decide what mattered, decide what could be thrown out (very little, as it turned out), and figure out how to keep the ideas in motion now that the man behind them was no longer in the room.
I was young. I had energy. I had a commercial pilot’s licence and my own aircraft, CF-DAY, which made the trips to Saint Louis and elsewhere practical.
And I had spent enough time around Marshall to recognize his handwriting and, more importantly, to recognize his thinking, to know which scribble in the margin of a book was a passing note and which one was the seed of something he had planned to develop later. That kind of recognition cannot be taught. You either have it because you were there, or you don’t.
[Nelson, what did you find in those boxes that surprised you? Was there a particular notebook, letter, or marginal note that stopped you in your tracks? Readers love this kind of detail. It puts them in the room with you, going through Marshall’s papers, finding things nobody else had seen.]
The archive work was where I learned that Marshall’s published books were the tip of the iceberg. He thought faster than he wrote, and he wrote faster than he published. There were entire frameworks he had worked out in correspondence with people like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and his own son Eric, that never made it into print in any organized way. Some of those frameworks I have been carrying around in my head ever since, waiting for the right moment to bring them forward. Parts of this book are that moment.
The Funfare
Shortly after Marshall died, a group of us put together what we called the McLuhan Funfare. It was held at the Coach House. The name was deliberate. Marshall did not want to be mourned. He wanted to be used. He had said many times, in many ways, that his work was a kit, not a creed, and that the worst thing his readers could do was turn him into a saint.
Barry Nevitt asked me to spearhead the revival and serve as MC for the lectures. He arranged it all with the McLuhan Program’s first Director, Mr. David Olson. I went for an interview with David, and he appointed me to start producing the lectures. I wrote the press release myself and had it published in the University news publications, inviting anyone interested to attend. We called the series the McLuhan Monday Night Seminars at the Coach House, 39A Queen’s Park Crescent East. The first lecture was written up in the Toronto Star on June 3, 1983.
[Nelson, who came? What did people say? Was there a moment that captured what Marshall meant to that group? If there’s a single image from that day that stuck with you, this is the place for it.]
Marshall had given me, and a small group of others, something that could not be replicated by reading the books. He had given us a way of looking. The question was what to do with it now that he was gone. Some of the people in that room went into academia. Some went into business. Some went quiet. I went into the work of keeping the thinking alive: first as archivist, then through the McLuhan Centre for Global Communications that Marshall’s family established, and later, beginning in 1995, as Research Director of the McLuhan Centre for Media Sciences, which was started by Barry Nevitt.
The titles changed. The work didn’t. The work was, and is, this: to look at the new environments that technology keeps building around us, and to ask the question Marshall taught me to ask. Not what is this for. What is this doing to us.
The Centre
The McLuhan Centre for Global Communications was set up by Marshall’s family because somebody had to do it. The University of Toronto had its own arrangements for Marshall’s papers and his official academic legacy, but the living work, meaning the consulting, the speaking, the application of the ideas to whatever new technology the world was about to throw at itself, needed a home outside the university. Universities are good at preserving thinkers. They are not always good at keeping thinkers in motion.
I directed the think tank division of the McLuhan Centre for Global Communications, and after that the McLuhan Centre for Media Sciences of Toronto.
What that meant in practice was that I sat down with whoever walked through the door and tried to apply Marshall’s frameworks to whatever they were dealing with. Sometimes the person at the table was a corporate executive trying to understand why his last three product launches had failed. Sometimes it was a journalist trying to write about a technology she did not yet have the language for. Sometimes it was a graduate student who had read Understanding Media twice and wanted to know what to read next. The work was not predictable, and that was the point. Marshall had not built a system. He had built a way of paying attention, and a way of paying attention has to be applied to specific situations or it withers.
[Nelson, pick one client, one case, one consulting story you can tell in detail without breaking confidentiality. The reader needs a concrete example of what “applying McLuhan” actually looks like in a room with somebody who is paying for the answer. Even a disguised version, with names changed, would work. Without one specific story here, this section stays abstract.]
In 1995 I left the McLuhan Centre for Global Communications and became Research Director of the McLuhan Centre for Media Sciences, a separate organization devoted, as the official description puts it, to understanding the relationship between communications, technology, and culture. I have consulted with governments, with courts, and with businesses. I have given evidence and given interviews and given lectures. The work is the same work I started doing the day I first walked into the Coach House. The only thing that has changed is the technology in the room.
The Press
Somewhere along the way, the press started calling. Not all at once. A reporter from The New York Times would call about something Marshall had said about television in 1968, because the prediction had just come true and somebody needed to explain it to the readers. The Telegraph would call from London about a piece on virtual reality. USA Today would want a quote about the Internet. Wired Magazine, which put Marshall’s face on the masthead of every issue and called him their “patron saint,” would want context. Paris Match and Time Magazine and a long list of others followed.
It helped that I had grown up with ink in my blood. My father, Dr. Burnett M. Thall, started as a University of Toronto professor and went on to serve the Toronto Star in nearly every senior capacity it had: consultant, senior executive, Vice-President, Senior Vice-President, Chairman of the Board, and Chairman of the Torstar Voting Trust, which controlled Torstar, the holding company that owned The Star.
From the time I was in public school, I regularly spent my Saturdays at 80 King Street West, or at the Harbour Plant, which eventually became 1 Yonge Street, The Star’s headquarters.
From 1997 to 2002, I replaced my father as a Director of the Toronto Star. So when reporters started calling about Marshall, the world they were calling from was not unfamiliar to me. I had been raised inside it.
By a count somebody made at one point, I have been interviewed and quoted in over a hundred major newspapers, magazines, and books. I do not say this to impress you. I say it because it tells you something about the strange position I have ended up in.
For about thirty years now, when a reporter has needed somebody to explain what Marshall would have said about this, whatever this happened to be that week, they have called me. That has been a privilege and it has also been a kind of education in itself. You learn what the public is ready to hear and what it is not. You learn which of Marshall’s ideas land easily and which ones make people shut down. You learn that the same idea that gets you a polite nod from a corporate boardroom will get you a long, hard look from a graduate seminar, because the audiences are listening with different ears.
[Nelson, is there one interview, one story, one journalist you remember as either particularly good or particularly frustrating? A reader will trust the chapter more if it admits that not every reporter got it right, and that you sometimes hung up the phone wishing you could try the answer again.]
I have also written. The chapter I contributed to Web-Weaving: Intranets, Extranets and Strategic Alliances, published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 1998, was an attempt to apply Marshall’s ideas to what the early Internet was becoming.
I called the chapter “The global village: today and tomorrow.” The framing came directly from Marshall, since the global village was his phrase, but the application to the networked corporation was where I tried to push the thinking forward into territory Marshall had not lived to see.
Some of what I wrote in that chapter has aged well. Some of it I would write differently today. That is how it should be. Marshall used to say that any thinker who has not contradicted himself by the end of his career has not been thinking; he has been repeating himself.
Why It Matters That I Was There
I want to come back, before this section closes, to the question of why any of this biography is worth a reader’s time.
It is not because I am important. I am not. Marshall was important. I am one of the people who happened to be in the room while he was working, and who has spent the years since trying to do something useful with what I saw and heard there. Marshall said once that all the epiphanies he had came mostly while talking to students in the classroom. Those of us who were the students remember that, because we were there when it happened.
It matters because Marshall’s method was not a doctrine. It was a practice. You cannot get the practice from the books alone, any more than you can learn to play a musical instrument by reading sheet music. You can get a great deal from the books, and Marshall would be the first to insist on that since he wrote them, but the books are the score, not the performance. The performance happened in conversation, in the back-and-forth, in the way Marshall would test an idea against the room and adjust it on the fly. Those of us who were in those rooms carry a version of the practice that is harder to write down. This book is my attempt to write it down anyway.
If I succeed, you will finish reading and feel that you have been in the room too. Not with me. With Marshall. That is the only success that would count.
Closing
I have been carrying this material for a long time. Some of it I have shared in interviews, in lectures, in consulting rooms, and in the chapter I wrote for Web-Weaving a quarter-century ago. Most of it I have not. There has always been another deadline, another phone call, another technology arriving on the horizon that needed explaining before the next one showed up behind it. The work of being a witness to Marshall has, until now, taken up most of the room I had for writing about him. This book is the room I am finally making.
I am writing it for two reasons, and I want to be honest about both. The first is that I want to share with the world what I learned from Marshall, while there is still time and while I am still the one telling it. Too many of the people who could have written this kind of book have already gone. Among the ones I had the great fortune to befriend were George Thompson, Harley Parker, Frank Zingrone, Betty Cera, Don Theall, Joe Keogh, Corinne and Mary McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt. Part of the urgency of this book is that the circle of people who can speak from inside the work has grown small. Marshall remarked to me and Donald Theall that it was a most serendipitous that his first Ph.d student was Donald Theall; and his last Ph.d student was me, Nelson Thall. McLuhan remarked that difference being the E-World, the electric world.
The second reason is simpler and closer to home. I have children, and I have a grandchild, and I want them to be able to hold something in their hands that tells them who their father and grandfather spent his life listening to, and why it mattered. A book is a strange thing to leave behind, when you think about it. It is paper and glue and ink. But it outlasts the person who made it, and that is the point. So this book is for you, the reader who picked it up out of curiosity. And it is for them, who did not have to. I want especially to thank my sons Henry and Nelson B. Thall, who were the vital forces in getting me to start writing about my time with McLuhan before I pass on. Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Nelson Jr.