Marshall-ing a new age.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDLES [wrap-up] - Marshall McLuhan - Viewpoint essay

In August I caught an article from the Los Angeles Times concerning media mogul Rupert Murdoch's plan to launch a national digital newspaper with paid content and directed toward the new tablet computers, like iPads, as well as mobile devices. The first thing that popped into my head was Marshall McLuhan.

I mentioned this to several people, and only those of a certain age had any idea of the connection. Marshall McLuhan, unfortunately, is now largely forgotten, at least in pop culture, and that's too bad since he was the darling of it 40 years ago. He coined the term "global village" 50 years ago, predicted the demise of print culture and foresaw the Internet 30 years before it existed. But then, McLuhan was fond of saying, "You know nothing of my work."

His most popular contribution to modern culture was the idea that "the medium is the message," and of course "the medium is the massage," sometimes construed as "massage." It's a very sophisticated analysis, but suffice to say that it was, say, television that mattered, not the content that was on television. The television itself, whether it featured children's shows or violence, changed the culture and altered personal habits and dynamics.

Then I caught wind of a change at the Grand Junction Sentinel You'll have to be a paid subscriber "in order to view an entire story you'd like to read." The paper, through its publisher Jay Seaton, acknowledged that "15 years ago, we got it wrong. As an industry."

I have to applaud both Murdoch and Seaton for trying to do something. Lord knows the newspaper and magazine business in the country has been woefully slow to pick up on the electronic information age. To its detriment. Someone had to step up with a semblance of a revenue plan for a new era.

But I can't help thinking that they are still getting it wrong, and there's a lesson in here for every business. As McLuhan once noted, "We become what we behold," so I seriously doubt that transferring a now-archaic medium to an electronic medium and then charging for it will find much success. We refer to news organizations collectively as "the media," but for all intents and purposes they--we--are simply one form of content. The medium was a newspaper or a magazine, there were...