Continuing my extraction of interviews from the 1995 Understand McLuhan interactive CD-ROM, I’m very happy to share an interview with Robert K. Logan, former University of Toronto physics professor, communications theorist, author and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan. His defense of his colleague and friend, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight, is an invaluable essay providing essential context for reading and empathizing with the “guru of the electronic age”. Nobody can better provide a “hard science”-informed bridge to the enigmatic, artistic McLuhan than Bob Logan.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Marshall McLuhan?

A: Well, I would like to talk about my relationship with Marshall McLuhan, because it was a great privilege to have known this man and to have been able to have collaborated with him. I was first introduced to him by Arthur Porter, when I began to organize a future studies group called “The Club of Gnu” and Marshall had heard about me, much to my surprise, because I taught a course called “The Poetry of Physics.” He invited me for lunch, and we sat and had lunch together in the St. Michael’s lunchroom where the professors and the priests would have lunch, and we talked about our work. And I told him about a theory I had: about how I felt science began in the West and not in China, even though the Chinese had invented everything—because of the influence of monotheism in the West and codified law. And Marshall said to me, “My gosh Bob, it’s a wonderful idea, but you’ve forgotten one thing: what else do we have in the West that they don’t have in China?” And he stumped me. I just couldn’t think, cause his ideas were coming at me so fast. And he smiled and he said “Well?” I said “I give up,” and he said “the alphabet,” and I groaned because all of a sudden I realized that the phonetic alphabet and deductive logic and abstract science had been tied together by him in his work. And so we tied my two contributions, monotheism and codified law together with his work, and within two weeks of having met Marshall McLuhan, we had written a paper together. And that paper became—it was published by the Etcetera magazine—and it launched my career in the field of communications.

Q: People’s first impressions of McLuhan are often extreme. Some called him a genius, others thought he was a charlatan. What were your first impressions of McLuhan?

A: He was a zany genius. He wasn’t crazy, he had his head on his shoulders. He knew what he was doing. He was a jokester, a prankster. A little “til eulenspiegel” but he loved to have fun. And that’s a part of the basis of our friendship, because I’m like that too. And we used to have a ball together: I remember he used to talk in his theories about putting on an audience. He was putting on people all the time. I was a physicist. Physicists tended to be a little more serious types. I never quite met anyone like him.

Q: Did the rest of the academic community here at the University of Toronto appreciate McLuhan at the time?

A: He had his supporters. They were few in number—a brave band. Most people greeted him with derision, probably out of jealousy. He made money, they didn’t. He got fame, they didn’t. He got attention, they didn’t. They worked harder, he seemed to be playing all the time. He just had a grand time. But of course there is a misconception about that too. He worked very hard. He never stopped. But he was playful, and that was an important part of his philosophy. He used to say: “Without the play between wheel and the axle, you have no movement, everything seizes up.” He was playful.

Q: As a scientist how do you view McLuhan’s theories about communication?

A: Well, he was a man who followed the scientific method. He made observations, he made generalizations. He was a great scientist. He was an explorer, a discoverer, an artist. He understood that art and science were the same thing. Maybe that’s why he wanted to meet me, when he heard that I taught a course called “The Poetry of Physics,” because I think they are the same thing too. But he wasn’t a scientist in the ordinary sense of the thing. He did revolutionary science, according to definition of Thomas Kuhn. And people that did normal science could never appreciate his revolutionary ideas.

Q: What is revolutionary science?

A: He was breaking new ground. He was explaining things that had never been explained before. He made people understand that the messenger was as important as the message that was being carried. That the medium carried its own message. I’m trying not to fall into saying, “The medium is the message”—but that’s what he taught us. He taught us that we lived in a global village. Things that have become part of our language. Anyone that can enrich our language had an impact. And I find his ideas throughout the literature. People never refer to him, however. He’s just crept into people’s bones. That’s a real genius.

Q: Do you know any other scientists who use and apply his theories?

A: Well, when I’m using and applying his theories, I don’t know if I’m being a scientist. The chairman of my physics department many years ago didn’t think I was doing science. I tried to persuade him otherwise, when I applied for research money. It was the Social Studies/Humanities research council that gave me the money. But you see, McLuhan said that there were no boundaries, that specialism just disappears with electric speeds. So, to make a division between science and art is ridiculous. They’re just merged, they’re just understanding.

Q: Could you paint a picture of the community of people around Marshall McLuhan at the time you worked with him?

A: Marshall McLuhan’s community was like The Village People. Everyone was there, it was so much fun. There was a car salesman: he taught Marshall about what was on the streets, what people were concerned about. There was a man that was on the executive at St. Lawrence Cement Company. There were scholars, there were artists, poets—lots of poets—and film makers, scholars, scientists. It was fun. Everyone was there to have a good time and to learn.

Q: How did the group come together, how was it formed?

A: If they had the temerity and the guts to come and contact Marshall McLuhan and he enjoyed their company, they were in. And if they didn’t, he was very cruel.

Q: What did he look for in a personality?

A: Honesty, openness, a sense of humor. He wanted to be instructed. He was always learning. So, all the people around him were all professors. Not academic ones, but they were professors of life.

Q: When you look back now, which of his theories do you think hold up? Are there some that you think have been disproved or discredited?

A: I don’t want to start with the negative, but hot and cold is not hot. However…

Q: What do you think is wrong with it?

A: I don’t know, I haven’t studied it, because it is not of interest to me. It didn’t give me any insights. I think television is a cool medium and he had some understanding of that medium. But the most important insight that he had about television is that it sucks the brains right out of your skull, and that it is a non-educational medium. Television can be informative. It cannot be educational—no one ever got a cognant bit of insight watching television. They can become informed, and they can process that information later, but it’s a drug. When I’m all relaxed after I’m really keyed up, like I’m working at my computer—I’ve composed three or four good pages and I can’t fly off to sleep, I turn on the tube. It’s a sedative. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, I’m ready to sleep.

Q: The popular assumption is that Marshall McLuhan was a prophet of the television age who celebrated technology, but there is a pessimism in some of his writing about the new media.

A: What do you mean by pessimism?

Q: He seemed to be warning us in some ways about the downside of the electronic world.

A: O.K., you asked me before, what was his major contribution? To me, his major contribution was to explain to people that media have an impact on them, independent of the information they carry. This was his major contribution: “The medium is the message.” He said it very succinctly, he was warning people that there was a whole new way of processing information, a whole new outlook on life, on thinking, on scholarship, on education, on work. And people were completely unaware of these changes. The man was a genius.

Now, of course it is a cliché to say he was a genius. I used to say he was a genius before—I loved him, he was my friend and he stimulated me. He gave me joy and he gave me insights so I called him a genius. But you know, a couple of weeks ago, I read, re-read the last paragraph of Understanding Media. I was just completing my book called Learning A Living and I was concerned with what the impact of information technology on work and education, and what the new relationship between work and education was going to be. So I looked through McLuhan. I scoured him, to find what he wrote on automation. The last chapter of Understanding Media —I read in fourteen pages, all of the “brand new” ideas that I read in the last five years, by authors such as Toffler, Drucker, Hammer and Champy, Tapscot and Caston and Senge. All of the new ideas! This man is really a genius—I’ve come to a new conclusion about him. The guy is a genius. Thirty years ahead of these guys, he predicted things that we’re just discovering now. I understand why we’re just discovering them now. One, because he was a genius and he saw way ahead of us, and two, no one had the experience of a microcomputer.

McLuhan understood microcomputers before they were invented. He said that we live in an age where life will be generated by knowledge and information. Toffler came up with this idea five or six years ago. Senge talks about formula learning organization, because this is the basis of creating wealth. McLuhan said that a long time ago. Drucker writes Post Capitalist Society. McLuhan said that with electric information, ideologies would melt away. It wouldn’t matter whether they are capitalist or communist, the effects would be the same. He was right.

Paradigm Shifts by Don Tapscott says companies will become extended enterprises, they will flow in global networks. McLuhan said that 30 years ago. He said the electric media will become extensions of our psyche. We’ll reach out across the globe. He said that the entire globe would become one big wealth-producing, money-making machine. He saw all these ideas many years ago.

Let’s talk about business process engineering; the idea of Hammer. McLuhan came up with that idea. He said that with electricity, process becomes the prime mover. That the processes are the key to understanding the way things will happen in the information age. He talked about the need to—that all functions would have to be reorganized. He didn’t use the word “re-engineering” but he came damn close. This man, thirty years ago had it all. All the ideas. Hammer and Champy business process of learning organization. He said the prime occupation of people will be learning. The man was a genius. I believe it.

Q: You said earlier that if McLuhan didn’t like someone he could be cruel. How?

A: When I say that he didn’t like people, he felt that people were wasting our time. He was a very polite man, he was old-school. But he had an agenda, and if somebody stood in the way of his agenda, and was wasting our time and being frivolous he would cut them down to ribbons. That’s what I mean when I say he was cruel. So that’s the way that he weeded out the people that he felt were there to be, you know, gawkers, at the McLuhan phenomenon.

Q: Do you remember any times watching him do this?

A: Yes, I remember him, three of four times I saw him do it. He could do a number on a person if he wanted to. But most of the time he didn’t. He was a very gentle and lovely man. But he was like a mother bear. Don’t get between him and his cubs. His cubs were new ideas, new insights. And of course, his probes, he was always probing, he was out there pushing the envelope.

Q: As a Canadian scholar, do you think McLuhan’s ideas were a part of his Canadianism. In other words, did being Canadian inform his work?

A: His theories were totally Canadian. Nobody from any other country could have done it. Maybe Chile, because it is another country that is very long and thin. Kennedy called it the “Marginal Case.” He said 90 per cent of our population lives within 100 miles of the American border. He loved Canada. He could have made millions in the United States, if he wanted to sell out. He remained in Toronto, this was his home. This is what he loved—to say he didn’t love Canada is ridiculous. He loved Canada. And he made it his home.

The reason that it happened in Canada—we talk sometimes about the Toronto School of Communication, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock. Why? Well, communication is what keeps Canada alive, keeps it together. We are stretched across 4,000 miles. This little ribbon. And somehow we are a cohesive country. Canadians don’t realize how cohesive we are. You see, we define ourselves as being inverse Americans, but we are not—we are Canadians. And we have a sense of who we are. We have a sense of decency. We’re not commercial people, the buck isn’t the most important thing in our culture. These are the kinds of things that that Marshall valued as well. And the reason he developed his theories here, was because without communication, what would tie this country together? And we’re the country that speaks two languages.

Q: He helped out former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at points. What did he bring to Trudeau? How did he help him?

A: Well, Trudeau was a common friend of both McLuhan and myself. At the time I met McLuhan I had just become the policy chairman of the Liberal party for Ontario. And as such, I was one of Trudeau’s advisors. I’d had a rapport with Mr. Trudeau—I’m not saying he took my advice—not many times, but once or twice. And I wrote a book called The Way Ahead for Canada based on a working paper that Trudeau had developed. McLuhan and I had worked on some ideas together, concerning the use of the two languages in Canada. We wrote letters to Trudeau about these, communicated with him. One of the fun evenings was a Monday night that Marshall McLuhan was having dinner with Trudeau in Toronto. He came to me that afternoon, he said, “Bob, I have a favour to ask of you.” “Sure Marshall, what is it?” I said. “I’d like you to run my seminar tonight.” I said, “Woo!” This was like, the king saying, “I’d like you to sit on my throne with my crown for an hour.” I said, “That would be a great privilege.” He said “Well, I’m having dinner tonight,”—and then a smile came across his face—“with Pierre Elliot Trudeau.” And I said, “Well, isn’t that wonderful.”

And at this point Marshall didn’t know that I knew Trudeau. So I decided to play a little prank on him and not tell him about my working relationship. This is how we discovered that we had our own relationships with him. So I kicked off the seminar that night and I said, “Marshall will be here later tonight with a very special guest. He’s asked me not to tell you who. Let’s talk about Canada tonight.” And we started our conversation. At about twenty minutes to nine I heard the motorcycles and I knew that it was the police escort, and I knew it was Marshall and the PM. And the door opened and I started smiling, because I knew what was going to happen. Marshall strode into the room and he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Prime Minister of Canada!”—and there was Mr. Trudeau. And I had the privilege of sitting with Mr. Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan and carrying on a conversation with our seminar group. Marshall was a little shocked when the PM said, “Hi Bob! How are you? I didn’t know you’d be here.” And so I had a little laugh on Marshall. We had a great time. Jim Cootes was there, the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, who was a friend to the McLuhan family. We had a great evening that night.

Q: There was a period where it seemed McLuhan’s theories fell out of favor. He somehow, at least in the popular sense, got lost. Why do you think this happened?

A: I don’t think his ideas ever fell out of favor among the scholars, OK. But you see McLuhan was a big pop phenomena, and as all pop things, they have their moment and then they fall off or decay exponentially. So he was just going through natural decay of superficial admirers of his work. What was happening though, was that a revolution was taking place. The microcomputer was introduced during the time of his death. He died December 31st 1980, just when the microcomputer was introduced. The IBM was introduced in 1981—the IBM PC. The Apple, too was out at this time. The experienced people I have had with microcomputing, have allowed the ideas of McLuhan to be lived by them, experienced by them. Let me put it in another way: with the microcomputer revolution people experienced the ideas that McLuhan was talking about. They were no longer theories. They are things they lived day-by-day. They saw all of the speed with which developments were taking place. They lived the information revolution and they all of a sudden began to realize that all these ideas meant something. Or they discovered these ideas, but not discovered them—not as the ideas of this pop guru who told Madison Avenue how to do its ads. They realized it was somebody that understood. They realized that it was somebody that had revealed to them that they lived in a global village. Because we now live in the global village.

When McLuhan first came out with the idea of a global village in ‘64, many of us did not live in a global village. Oh, yes, we took an airplane to Europe, we were hip, we drank wine, but we did not have that instantaneous communication. The genius in McLuhan is that he saw this way before anyone else.

Q: In the last few years there have been several projects on McLuhan: documentaries, radio programs, even two stage plays. Is there a reason for this rebirth, of McLuhan now?

A: Yes, the reason for the rebirth of McLuhan now is because of the microcomputer revolution. In 1986, I published a book called The Alphabet Effect , which is based on the original research I did with Marshall. That book has remained in print since the time I first published it. And there’s always going to be an interest in the ideas of McLuhan. I’m not Marshal McLuhan, I’m Bob Logan, OK? I’m a faint shadow compared to this guy. And my book, which was about the book that we did together, continues to have a readership. Why? Because of the ideas that were there, ideas that I helped to develop with Marshall McLuhan. And I give him credit for the ideas in The Alphabet Effect . For Learning a Living , I’ll take some credit for my own. He wasn’t around to help me with that one. But, you know, he communicates with me daily, because all of the ideas that I get have to do with the ideas that he planted in my head over 15 years ago.

Q: What would have fascinated McLuhan if here were alive today?

A: Everything would fascinate him. The change would fascinate him, virtual reality would fascinate him, the Internet. Let’s take the Internet. Marshall McLuhan said something like, the information age will turn us into nomads searching for knowledge. What is a person that uses the Internet, surfing thorough information? Man, he understood the Internet. He was the internet in the ’60s. The world’s just finally caught up to him. He was an internet. He was in touch with the entire globe. For some reason, this man had his fingers in everything. He was wired long before the editors of Wired magazine were born. This man was wired.

Q: What about the people that would have fascinated him today, who would he have tried to surround himself with?

A: Paglia would not have fascinated him.

Q: Why?

A: She is loud, vulgar and thinks too much of herself. He was a modest man, actually. He didn’t toot his own horn. He tooted the horn of his ideas, but, you know. A lot of people would say, “Oh, I am a McLuhanite,” and use his name to promote their ideas, but I think he would have not liked that too much.

Q: What about Bill Gates?

A: Oh, he would have liked that little brat. He would have liked what Gates has done.

Q: Many of McLuhan’s terms are in popular press and in the media; they’ve become part of the information age. People talk about “the medium is the message,” but do they really understand it?

A: If they are under 10 yes, if they are over 10 maybe. If they are smart and they are over 10, yes. For people like me, 55, I don’t think very many people understand it. I was lucky, I had to live with the man everyday, but you know, I saw him four or five times a week.

Q: And did it take you a little while to understand these concepts?

A: Well, I didn’t guess the alphabet, when he asked me about what we had in the West that we didn’t have in the East. I read his works and was very taken by them. But I would say, that at a superficial level I got an insight into his ideas that I never had before. And I had been reading all of those authors I mentioned to you earlier. Read them and re-read them and understood their ideas and didn’t realize their connection to McLuhan until I read that chapter once again.