Mass-media guru Marshall McLuhan died at 69 in 1980, just as the video-communications boom he had prophesied was on the point of bursting into virtually every North American household.
The television generation had long since come of age, which supplied Canadian-born scholar McLuhan with an enormous control-group population for his research into the effects of cathode-ray stimulus and sensory overload.
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But the more-or-less passive broadcast audience that McLuhan knew was poised at the time of his death to become an active, program-controlling audience. The arrival of cable TV had already enabled consumers to become somewhat more selective as to what they’d pipe into their living rooms, and now the cost of do-it-yourself video programming (first mass-marketed during the middle 1970s, but only as a big-ticket investment) was beginning to drop to a generally affordable level.
As the shadow of McLuhan looms ever larger, the prevailing question among videophiles today is, “What would McLuhan say?”
Practical answers to the McLuhan question will be sought, and probably talked to death, during November’s sessions of the Dallas Video Festival, which combines saturation programming with selective control by members of the audience.
“Video is on the edge of a cliff,” festival chief Barton Weiss said. “We’re looking over a new world. The programming and responses to it are changing fast.”
More than 5,000 are expected to take in this seventh Dallas Video Festival, Thursday through Nov. 14. at the Dallas Museum of Art. The uncommonly ambitious agenda promises to put the “vision” back in “television,” showcasing a variety of past-and-present programming, participatory demonstrations of new technology, guest speakers and discussion groups.
“By looking back at the work of McLuhan,” said Weiss, “we can reinterpret today’s media – such as high-definition TV and virtual reality.”
The gist of McLuhan is that technology is an artificial branch of the central nervous system and links even the most isolated societies in “a global village.”
Any communications medium, he insisted, stimulates the senses in varying mixed proportions, and dictates the ways in which people process, categorize and respond to their experiences.
Reading, he maintained, isolates people because it detaches them from human contact. He held that television, by contrast, connects people. In any event, McLuhan asserted, no matter what the subject matter, the medium is its own message.
Detractors cite McLuhan as an extremist, but his enemies remain undecided as to whether he oversimplified or overintellectualized matters. What remains important is that he sought aggressively to understand where our headlong immersion in electronic media would lead.
And the Dallas Video Festival has done much to pick up where McLuhan left off. The expo’s programs also will include a wealth of jazz video documents, children’s entertainment, computer-generated graphics and combination “live”-and-video performances.
For tickets and more information, call 214-651-8888.