Marhsall McLuhan

BOB DOBBS creative visionary of the 2004 McLuhan Festival in Toronto returns in 2005 with his own parallel conference - his anti-environment to the much maligned McLuhan festival. Tentatively entitled, BOB DOBBS and THE CANADIAN PHAT IN CONCERT 5-nite run - The previous theme will be the invisible, confidential subtext. Details to follow, but except 5 conference sessions with one of the most interesting and enigmatic figures in media studies today. Email for more information.

TORONTO STAR STORY ABOUT BOB DOBBS BY MCLUHAN BIOGRAPHER PHILIP MARCHARD

Sooner or later, I thought, I was going to have to read The Da Vinci Code.
I was going to have to read it before I read the novelists on the Giller
shortlist. It was my duty as a books columnist.
I asked Bob Dobbs if he had read The Da Vinci Code. Dobbs was hosting an
event in the downstairs theatre later in the evening. "Former McLuhan
archivist Bob Dobbs expands on McLuhan's ideas while discussing the
present-day simulation of ESP in our electronic environment," was the way it
was described in the festival schedule.
Dobbs told me he was using a quotation from my Marshall McLuhan biography on
the subject of McLuhan and ESP. "It's on page 142 of the book, I think," he
said. (He was right, it turned out. I was flattered.)
Dobbs also told me the event was somewhat more involved than the description
in the festival schedule. It was more in the nature of an actual sÈance with
some of the illustrious dead. He told me who they were, but I do not feel at
liberty to reveal their names.
As for The Da Vinci Code, he hadn't read it. He hardly needed to. His own
father had been a member of the Priory of Sion, the group of illuminati
mentioned in the novel. The novel itself was "simple and stupid."
I gathered at least that it was not a historical novel.]
http://tinyurl.com/3nuz8
[Toronto Star, Oct.16, 2004. 01:00†AM
Cracking Canada's literary code
Giller nominees reveal persistent obsession with past and small towns
By PHILIP MARCHAND
Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece in the Star suggesting that the emphasis
in Canadian literature on rural or smalltown Canada, and the emphasis on the
past as opposed to the present, was due to end.
Not that I was against such literature. I was just saying there should be
more room in Canadian literature for fictional examination of the life we
live now, in the suburbs and the great cities of this country.
I wasn't expecting Canadian authors to jump up after reading this article
and start writing about clubs on Queen St. instead of harvest time in old
Orillia. It was a thought.
In more recent years, I noticed the tendency of the Giller Prize juries to
like historical novels. I wrote about that, as well. I hope I didn't sound
crabby about it.
Recently, the 2004 Giller Prize shortlist was announced.
Three of the six nominated books were historical fictions ã Wayson Choy's
All That Matters dealt with Vancouver in the 1930s, Shauna Singh Baldwin's
The Tiger Claw dealt with Nazi-occupied France and Pauline Holdstock's
Beyond Measure was set in 16th-century Italy.
Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness was set in a small Mennonite town.
Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway was also set for the most part
in small-town Canada, and had a decided flavour of retrospective, of looking
backward.
That left Paul Quarrington's Galveston, which was contemporary in setting
and flavour, although a bit removed from life in the big city as well.
That was fine; I wasn't complaining.
But I still wondered if, in our literary culture, a work of fiction set in
present-day Toronto was somehow regarded as a bit trivial.
A good writer who carefully observed contemporary life always ended up
sounding satirical, and to some people satire was Not Serious. Better to
have these soulful looks at the past, at a way of life that was vanishing.
That was real literature.
Ezra Pound said that the artist was the antenna of the race, and presumably
he meant fiction writers as well. But there was nothing in such recent
Giller Prize winners as Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan (small-town Ontario
in the first part of the 20th century) or M.G. Vassanji's The In-Between
World Of Vikram Lal (Kenya in the 1950s and '60s) that suggested sensitivity
to new stimuli.
Pound, by the way, was not suggesting that artists made good fortunetellers.
He was merely suggesting that artists, unlike most people, actually lived in
the present instead of the past. They might not even know exactly what they
were doing but their work registered changes in the human environment.
You could see the bourgeois family coming into its own in the 18th-century
novels of Samuel Richardson. You could see the new urban life, shaped by
such phenomena as finance capitalism and newspaper sensationalism, in the
novels of Balzac and Dickens.
By coincidence, just as the Giller announced its shortlist, the McLuhan
International Festival of the Future ã named after a professor of literature
who took much of his inspiration from the works of James Joyce and other
modernist writers ã came to town. (It continues until tomorrow.)
I thought I'd drop by the Drake Hotel one night last week and ask some of
the McLuhanites, or McLuhanatics, as they are sometimes referred to, what
they were reading.
Were they finding in the "serious" fiction of today the same insight McLuhan
found in Joyce and Wyndham Lewis?
Were they looking forward to the new Wayson Choy or the new Paul Quarrington
or any of the other novels on the Giller list?
The Drake Hotel, in case you didn't know, is a trendy place that opened on
Queen St. W. earlier this year. It had different rooms for different events,
including a little theatre downstairs with plastic lawn chairs for the
audience. Upstairs, in the main lounge, was a fireplace and an inscription
on the wall: IT'S A CRUEL WORLD AND I'M GONNA DO ALL I CAN TO KEEP IT CRUEL.
A dozen or so people had gathered in a section of the lounge to talk about
Marshall McLuhan when I arrived. Eric McLuhan was hosting the discussion and
urging the creative director of the festival, Thom Sokoloski, to repeat an
experiment that his father undertook in 1960, when one group of students
listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debates on radio, and another group watched it
on television.
This time one group could watch the Kerry-Bush debate on television, and
another could just listen to the audio portion.
"Get the two groups sequestered and after the debate have them talk among
themselves and collect their ideas, and then have them talk to the other
group," McLuhan suggested. "Why not?"
He looked up and saw a Computerland balloon floating in the sky. "Talk about
media ã a hot air balloon."
"Advertising computers," another member of the group said, to laughter.
I asked Eric McLuhan what he was reading.
"I love detective stories," he said. "I like to see how they're built." This
was in keeping with Marshall McLuhan's own interest in the genre, which he
felt had affiliations with French symbolist poetry. Both started with a
certain effect (in the case of the detective novel, a murder) and invited
the reader to discover the process by which that effect came to be.
Eric McLuhan also liked The Da Vinci Code.
"Totally bogus," he said. "And a good read."
I asked Sokoloski what he was reading. The answer was varied. He had just
read a book by Guy Debord titled Society Of Spectacle, about a school of
artists called the Situationists, and also the catalogue for the Jean
Cocteau exhibit in Montreal. A lot of his reading was done on the computer
screen.
"I like to build my own book and sit down and read all these interesting
things I've picked up from the Internet," he said. "During the Iraq war, I
was fascinated by what other newspapers in the world, like Le Monde, were
saying."
I pressed him further. "I love cooking magazines," he said. "You give me a
good recipe and I'm in heaven. That's a complete commitment to recipe form,
structure and delivery. You start cooking at 4 and you've got to put it on
the table at 6."
I was beginning to despair about Choy and Quarrington and Alice Munro.
I asked a man named Eric, a 39-year-old McLuhan devotee who had worked in
advertising and building websites, what he was reading. He said Camus's
novel L'…tranger, which sounded hopeful, if not exactly something hot off
the press.
Then he added, "The Da Vinci Code. Couldn't put it down for two days."
A volunteer for the festival said she was on the waiting list for The Da
Vinci Code at her local library.
Sooner or later, I thought, I was going to have to read The Da Vinci Code. I
was going to have to read it before I read the novelists on the Giller
shortlist. It was my duty as a books columnist.
I asked Bob Dobbs if he had read The Da Vinci Code. Dobbs was hosting an
event in the downstairs theatre later in the evening. "Former McLuhan
archivist Bob Dobbs expands on McLuhan's ideas while discussing the
present-day simulation of ESP in our electronic environment," was the way it
was described in the festival schedule.
Dobbs told me he was using a quotation from my Marshall McLuhan biography on
the subject of McLuhan and ESP. "It's on page 142 of the book, I think," he
said. (He was right, it turned out. I was flattered.)
Dobbs also told me the event was somewhat more involved than the description
in the festival schedule. It was more in the nature of an actual sÈance with
some of the illustrious dead. He told me who they were, but I do not feel at
liberty to reveal their names.
As for The Da Vinci Code, he hadn't read it. He hardly needed to. His own
father had been a member of the Priory of Sion, the group of illuminati
mentioned in the novel. The novel itself was "simple and stupid."
I gathered at least that it was not a historical novel.] The Great Bob Dobbs

What about Bob?

...Bob Dobbs probes McLuhan's techniques of modern anthropology to discover the "out-of-awareness" aspects of culture while examining the rhetoric of advertising and entertainment. This interactive discussion will help shift perceptions of the effects of our ever-changing media structures.ROBERT DOBBS, author of PHATIC COMMUNION WITH ROBERT DOBBS, has evolved common sense into the discipline of "media yoga." His extensive research has been utilized by Donald Theall (THE VIRTUAL MARSHALL McLUHAN), Frank Zingrone (THE MEDIA SYMPLEX), Barry Miles (ZAPPA), Kevin Courrier (THE SUBVERSIVE WORLD OF ZAPPA) among many others. DOBBS serves as a paramedia consultant to everyone from universities to major corporations. His recent appearance at The McLuhan International Festival of the Future was the talk of Toronto.

Robert Dobbs summarized McLuhan's contribution in his letter to the editor of the March 3, 2003 issue of the New York Observer: "Ron Rosenbaum's celebration of the works of Norman Mailer ('Mailer Was the Rage,' Feb. 10) perhaps misses the context that cries out for the Great American Novel. The essence of the G.A.N. is the range of its 'put-on.' It attempts to put on and wear not only its own times, but the full history of printed American literature, especially its recognized classics.

Mr.Mailer's problem involves the question of whether a book can compete with the other put-ons, or media, that engage the American multi-consumer. Perhaps a solution is to write a novel that puts on all the media. This was accomplished by Marshall McLuhan with his published work, especially UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, which he considered a new form of novel and a new kind of science fiction.

Mr. McLuhan, starting from the premise that the daily newspaper was the great American novel, put on the competition, and did what Mr. Mailer couldn't -changed the world and the English language- all through his writing.

"We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." - McLuhan

Media analyst/cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age.
 
"In Renaissance times, it was the scientist versus the humanist. The scientist would invent and the humanist or artist would write or create, dealing with the side effects of the invention."

McLuhan felt that, for the most part, traditional art was no longer serving this purpose.
"McLuhan believed that electronic environments were molding people on a scale that was greater than any artwork, and that, therefore, artists should embrace the technologies of the future," says Dobbs.

McLuhan's oft-cited example of his theory in practice was James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a book Dobbs says mirrors the media environment of radio, which was dominant in the 1930s. The book was finished in 1939.

McLuhan's theory on media was divided between old "analog media" (newspapers, radio, TV) and forms of digital media that were in early stages of development in the 1960s and 1970s, and now are common in the home computer age.

McLuhan, understanding information overload and short attention spans, would often express his philosophy in catch phrases and sound bite quotes.His catch phrase for old media was that the "medium is the message."
"By this, he meant that in mass media environments, people are molded not only by the content but by a sensory bias specific to the medium," says Dobbs.
For digital media, he adopted a different adage, that the "user is the content."
"Once VCRs, and eventually computers, became readily available, it gave more control to the user," says Dobbs. "Now you can control the time that information is fed to you.
"With PCs and workstations and the internet, people are able to interact and have more of a choice. The user can mold and manipulate the content."
"Generation X is still somewhat in the clutches of old media. Generation Y, the younger generation, however, laughs at the old mass media. That's why Jon Stewart (host of the Daily Show, a news spoof television program) is more powerful than Dan Rather," says Dobbs.
"Now the flip side is that sometimes with digital media the user tends to think he's in control, when he's really being fed information in the same form of old media."
In November and December 1981, after McLuhan's death, Dobbs sifted through decades of McLuhan's letters, essays, manuscripts and notes, making chronological sense out of the materials.
"I had known McLuhan for years," says Dobbs. "His family knew I knew him. "I knew the history of his work. So I was asked to organize McLuhan's 'garbage', so to speak — all of the filing cabinets and boxes that were in his house."
The results of Dobbs' work now rest with the National Archives in Ottawa, as McLuhan was Canadian.
McLuhan's heyday of popularity was in the 1960s, starting with the release of Understanding Media in 1964, and reaching its peak in the late 1960s.
"His ideas were kind of a youth culture fad at that point," says Dobbs. "He also went through a period in the 1970s where it was not cool to like him."
Dobbs considers McLuhan's best proteges to be futurist authors Charles Reich, Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt.
But Dobbs suggests that perhaps today's information age is not ripe for theorists like McLuhan to be viewed as leaders or idolized in popular culture.
"These days there seems to be no need for gurus speaking for society," says Dobbs. "Society is so fragmented by digital media and full of micro-gurus, all reaching their small enclaves."
"The closest equivalent that I can think of to the sort of gurus with mass reach that there used to be would be Wired magazine, where the magazine itself has become the guru," says Dobbs.