Tom Wolfe: writer "got" McLuhan

Tom Wolfe, pioneer of New Journalism, "got" Marshall McLuhan in a way few other writers, thinkers, pundits and fellow travelers ever did. Wolfe wrote an article for the New York Herald Tribune in 1965, asking "what if he is right?" in its title and we now know that McLuhan anticipated the electronic environment a remarkable achievement for a man who died in 1980.

 Tom Wolfe, pioneer of New Journalism, "got" Marshall McLuhan in a way few other writers, thinkers, pundits and fellow travelers ever did. Tom Wolfe died last week at 88 years of age. The news anchors highlighted Wolfe as a pioneer of the New Journalism and as a novelist with a keen eye for societal structures and strictures. None mentioned Wolfe and his interest in Marshall McLuhan.

Wolfe entered the world of Sixties and a Ken Kesey led group of acid-dropping hippies in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”You were either “on the bus”with the acid droppers or otherwise “off the bus.”Wolfe never dropped acid but managed to stay on the bus to tell the story.

Wolfe captured the excitement of the Apollo space program with“The Right Stuff”.  He helped make test pilot Chuck Yeager a household name with his evocative stories of cool cucumber pilots breaking the sound-barrier and moving us closer to the heavens.

In the “The Bonfire of the Vanities”Wolfe explored Wall Street greed back in the Eighties and the high rolling Masters of the Universe with their big ambitions and financial clout. 

McLuhan, probably a sociologist at heart, loved society and its paradoxes—the“human carnival,”he always stated, was going stronger than ever and provided a great palette for the writer observer, the student of human foibles.

None of the news broadcasts or Tom Wolfe obituaries mentioned his interest in the theories of Marshall McLuhan. As far back as 1965, Wolfe wrote an article on McLuhan where he asked in the title—“what if he is right?”

McLuhan correctly perceived McLuhan had unlocked the cuckoo clock of technology and the profound effect the new electric environment would have on us all. Wolfe, a quick study, explains the shift in sensory balance as Electronic Man moves from the printed word with its emphasis on the eye and the visual to the acoustic, multi-sensory electic world. McLuhan brilliantly predicted a return to a kind of tribalism, the rise of a global village where we all sit around an electron-powered campfire.

Wolfe mentions McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" as an underground best-seller at the time of this article. He points out McLuhan as the master of the epigrammatic statement with "global village" and "the medium is the message." 

What you say on the cellphone is much less important than the fact that you are using a cellphone.”

The new electronic man becomes more emotional as he leaves the visual logic of the printed page. The tribesman in the jungle gets his information around a campfire. The process is intimate and emotional. Our social media world rocks with out-of-control emotions as information travels at the speed of light and everybody knows the business of everybody else.

Follow the link here to read the New York Herald Tribune article from 1965.

http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/course/spring96/wolfe.html

The full title of the piece:

suppose he is what he sounds like,
the most important thinker since
newton, darwin, freud, einstein,
and Pavlov what if he is right?

-TOM WOLFE

Turns out--  McLuhan was right!