McLuhan meets MTV

What’s up MTV rockers! Tonight it’s like totally my pleasure to invite on to the set long-time media theorist and sex-bomb professor Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan everybody.

Shitty pop music, canned applause.

Well thank you Jessica. It’s a, it’s a, hrm, pleasure to be joining you.

It’s honestly great having you here Mr. McLuhan. You can call me J-town, if you want. So how’s it, you know, going?

Well honestly I must admit that being here is, ahem, something of a shock.

Oh really? What’s up?

Well for starters, I’ve been dead for thirty years. Thirty years, um, this week actually.

No way! Can you believe that, rockers?

Yes, yes it’s, hrm, true. Um, I’m not actually… not actually sure how I ended up here. Say Jessica, do you know where I might locate a phone booth?

Hah you’re a funny one, Mr. McCluhan. Phone booth, right. Want to use my cell? The medium is the message and all that, you know.

I... I see.

Jessica hands him her iPhone. McLuhan holds the device in his hand confusedly, looking for buttons. After staring at it for a moment, he gives up and sets it down on the table in front of him.

Ok… So Mr. McLuhan, what are your, um, like first impressions of the twenty-first century?

Now this will take quite a while to explain but when I was theorizing about this back in the seventies I did think, I did think that it would be much closer to a global village than what I’ve been able to glean so far. Chatting casually, spontaneously without a script and paying attention to what is being said only goes so far, you see.

Huh? Global village? What’s, like, that?

The global village is like the way the American south felt about the Yankee north, as it were. It is a place of very arduous interfaces.

Oh for sure, Marshall. That’s like totally cool.

Jessica, clearly you know nothing of my work. You know, I think I would prefer if um, if you called me by my proper name.

Whoops! My bad, Mr. MacLowen. Sorry about that… Um, well it seems that we’ve just about run out of time! A fog horn sounds offstage. Again, thanks for joining all us rockers. This is MTV’s Jessica “J-town” Mascaroni, reporting, like, live from MTV Studios.

More canned applause, even shittier pop music.

Oh thank goodness. Can I please go now?