When I found Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan listed as an available book for self-assignment, I jumped at the chance to review it. (I had already started reading a copy of McLuhan’s 1964 book [1], which I found in the book sale section of the local public library for 25 cents.) Coupland’s book is a delightful and informative complement to reading McLuhan himself; buy it.

Many of the biographical details--dates, places, people, and events--in McLuhan’s life are already well known and/or can be learned from a variety of sources. McLuhan’s career was in the humanities. He was educated in English literature in Canada, and earned a doctorate degree from Cambridge with a dissertation on the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan poet and satirist. After teaching a few years at the University of Wisconsin and Saint Louis University, he returned to Canada where he rose eventually to prominence as a scholar of media at the University of Toronto. McLuhan looked at everyday life--including billboards, comic books, television, advertisements, and games--as subject matter suitable for scholarship. His work seized public awareness during the 1960s, resulting in fame and financial reward. A lot of hyperbole and nonsense about McLuhan’s writings in the 1960s was satirized by Woody Allen in Annie Hall. In fact, McLuhan had a very small part in the movie, providing the line in the title of this biography: “You know nothing of my work!” (The script of this scene is included in its entirety.) The discipline of media studies owes much of its existence to McLuhan’s insights and personal dynamism.

Marshall McLuhan is still relevant today. His prescient books predicted many of the characteristics of today’s society, including the pervasiveness of electronic media and the incorporation of the common forms of media of a half-century ago as the content of the new electronic media (that is, Internet-driven). He discerned deep patterns in the evolution of technology and culture that took decades to take form. For example, in the 1960s, most cities were fortunate to have three or four television stations for which a rabbit ears antenna sufficed. The viewer had no choice other than to watch a show while it was being broadcast or else hope that it would be rerun over the summer. Now there are hundreds of channels, and viewers can watch shows whenever they want with video on demand. Internet-based services broadcast shows to viewers’ computer screens, and file-sharing services like YouTube allow users to watch anything from lectures on higher mathematics to cats doing silly things. The content of the video is less important than the availability of the video itself, which has become a commodity to be marketed, and everything available on the computer is merely a video stream, including movies that had to be seen in theaters four decades ago. The commoditization of video is the phenomenon behind the competition for bandwidth and the fight over net neutrality.

Coupland’s biography recounts the usual details of McLuhan’s life, but also tries to understand his mental processes, based on his life as a boy and young man in a dysfunctional family, and medical history. Coupland argues that McLuhan had Asperger’s syndrome, a highly functional form of autism (although it can be difficult to differentiate between Asperger’s syndrome and highly intelligent nerdiness). Coupland argues that Asperger’s enabled McLuhan to be more sensitive to patterns that would have eluded anyone else. Coupland even includes Simon Baron-Cohen’s test for Asperger’s so that readers can test themselves.

McLuhan’s domineering mother was involved in performance rhetoric and theater, and her interest in rhetoric significantly influenced his professional career. Her obsession with rhetoric provided a way for McLuhan to become more socially adept by compensating for the inward directedness of Asperger’s. According to Coupland, McLuhan had a one-in-a-billion anatomy because he had two arteries delivering blood to his brain (instead of one like most people). Coupland believes that this abnormality (having an enhanced blood supply to the brain) may be relevant to McLuhan’s thought processes, and was a factor in his partial recovery from a major stroke toward the end of his career and life.

If McLuhan had Asperger’s syndrome, it shows how precarious his success was. McLuhan was always unorthodox as an academic, and was a very unconventional teacher. He was an outlier on the range of personalities. Academic politics were troublesome. He was fortunate to have had supportive department chairs and mentors at critical junctures who encouraged him in his work. He packed students into his courses because of the intellectual adventures he offered. What happened in his classes often had little to do with the syllabus. Reading this biography made me wonder just how long McLuhan would have lasted in academia now, where faculty personalities are under close scrutiny as part of “collegiality,” group-think is normative, courses must list student-learning outcomes, students are rigorously assessed in the context of a program’s learning outcomes and objectives, and students think like consumers, purchasing credentials that will get them jobs when they graduate. McLuhan would have been fortunate to have lasted long enough to have a tenure review.

McLuhan’s work itself appears both in the narrative and in short passages in sidebars and conclusions/introductions to chapters. The selections are well chosen and provide a good outline of McLuhan’s thoughts. Coupland’s biography will motivate readers to acquaint themselves with McLuhan’s writings. They are relevant today and are worth the effort, even though McLuhan’s style is breathless and dense with images, much like Jack Kerouac’s.

I found only one factual error in the book, and it has nothing to do with McLuhan’s writings. The biography states that McLuhan’s first professional job was in 1936, as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, “earning $895 a month.” This would have been a princely salary in 1936. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average wage was $895 per year in 1937, the first year social security taxes were collected. I noticed this error since my parents were in their twenties during the Depression, and I recall their horror stories while I was growing up. More importantly, there is a big difference between how I verified this number now than what I would have had to do in 1964, when Understanding media was copyrighted. I went online and used a search engine that provided me with a number of leads that I could check in an hour or two in the comfort of my home. In 1964, I would have had to take the bus downtown to the university library or the main public library, and then dig around all day (or maybe two days) in print indices and abstracts or archives of government documents to track down the information needed to verify my suspicion that this was an error.

As McLuhan predicted, electronic media will extend and accelerate our lives. The basic gathering of facts is certainly a lot faster (even though thousands of hits are overwhelming). However, critically evaluating the claims and facts still takes at least the same amount of time and effort.