What Marshall McLuhan Still Has to Teach Us: A Conversation with Grant Havers

Few academics enjoyed the degree of attention in the popular culture as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan did in the late 1960s. A fixture on the television circuit of the period, McLuhan laid out his view that "the medium is the message" on television programs such as NBC Experiment in Television and was interviewed by hosts including Dick Cavett and David Frost. Although McLuhan's thinking was derided at times by fellow academics, his insights on media proved widely influential and shaped the thinking of those in the next generation of media theorists, including Neil Postman.

It was McLuhan who argued for what are now considered key tenets of media studies, such as the idea that one can only appreciate a particular period of technological change after it has passed or that electric media tend to move a society away from a contemplative and deliberative culture based on the primacy of the written word. The type of medium, McLuhan famously argued, is more fundamental than the content transmitted through said medium.

Although McLuhan's celebrity waned in the years preceding his death in 1980, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and TikTok, there is reason to believe that McLuhan's ideas about the transformative power of new types of media deserve re-examination. As such, in September of last year, Grant Havers, the chair of Trinity Western University's department of philosophy, released his book The Medium Is Still the Message: Marshall McLuhan for Our Time. In it, Havers provides key biographical insights about McLuhan from his upbringing to his conversion to Catholicism to his views on certain political matters of the day before exploring McLuhan's essential insights. New media, Havers explains through McLuhan, tend to have profound impacts on society—and not always for the better.

In the following conversation with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, Havers discusses fundamental concepts in McLuhan's work such as "the medium is the message," the impact of the televised 1960 presidential debate on politics, and the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. Crucially, they discuss the potential impacts of artificial intelligence and other new technologies on society, including our increased dependence on them. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.