[EXCERPT FROM FILM ANNIE HALL PLAYS]

MAN: It's the influence of television. Now, now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being a, a high-- high intensity, you understand? A hot medium--

WOODY ALLEN: What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it.

MAN: -- as opposed to the truth which he [sees as the] media or--

WOODY ALLEN: What can you do when you get stuck on a movie line with a guy like this behind you?

MAN: Now, Marshall McLuhan--

WOODY ALLEN: You don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work--

MAN: Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture, so I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity.

WOODY ALLEN: Oh, do you?

MAN: Yeah.

WOODY ALLEN: Oh, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. Come over here for a second?

MAN: Oh--

WOODY ALLEN: Tell him.

MARSHALL McLUHAN: -- I heard, I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

WOODY ALLEN: Boy, if life were only like this.

BOB GARFIELD: Everybody knows who Marshall McLuhan was --the literature professor and communications theorist wrote his seminal book, Understanding Media, in 1964 and spent the next three decades expounding on the influence of media on the society and the individual psyche. McLuhan famously coined the term "global village" to describe electronic connectivity. He spoke of hot media versus cool media, feedback loops and, most famously of all, the inscrutable idea that the "medium is the message." But McLuhan is also very difficult to understand. His writing was dense, and so erudite as to be sometimes impenetrable to mere mortals. But McLuhan also lectured and was interviewed widely, so maybe the more conversational format made his ideas more accessible.

MARSHALL McLUHAN: You can't lose; you can't win. The present includes the past and the future.

BOB GARFIELD: Hm. Or, you know, maybe not.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: I think part of understanding McLuhan is getting the lingo, getting into the swing of the way he thinks.

BOB GARFIELD: McLuhan's daughter Stephanie is co-editor of a book titled Understanding Me. This volume attempts to use the scholar's spoken word to help flesh out the abstractions.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: I don't mind saying, and I'm not a giant intellect; I'm a reporter and a documentary producer -- you can get it. You can get it if you want to, and I think it's really worth it. However, I don't come across anyone who actually admits to understanding him.

BOB GARFIELD: Let me just play you one piece of tape from the interview with Tom Snyder.

TOM: Forgive my impertinence, but has anybody asked you why you are sometimes difficult to understand? [LAUGHS]

MARSHALL McLUHAN: Because I use the right hemisphere when they're trying to use the left hemisphere.

TOM: Okay, well-- [LAUGHS]

MARSHALL McLUHAN: Simple.

TOM: -- I'll try and get back on the--

MARSHALL McLUHAN:You see the one thing -- when people, ordinary, ordinarily people are trained to try to follow you and to connect everything you say with what they last heard. They're not prepared to use their wits. They're only prepared to use the idea they picked up the first time and try to connect it to another idea. See, that's left hemisphere. I use the right hemisphere a great deal, which is a world of perception, not -- no concepts. So that, that is the way it - the cookie crumbles sort of thing where you don't know what's going to happen but you follow the crumble.

BOB GARFIELD:From the early '60s, your father was declared a visionary and people hung on every difficult word, but at some point in his career, near the end of his life, he seemed to lose his luster.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Well, today, you know it doesn't take 20 years to lose your luster, right? It takes about 20 minutes. So I think he had a pretty good run. But I think one of the reasons could have been that people did perceive him as a visionary and maybe people became disenchanted that he didn't have all the answers. But I, I do think that he got caught up in sort of the, you know, the celebrity fanfare and was over-exposed. I mean he-- Don't forget when-- he was thrown into the media spotlight. He would have never come to light had it not been for Tom Wolfe and Howard Gossage who promoted him in the media.

BOB GARFIELD: Howard Gossage, the San Francisco advertising man.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: That's right.

BOB GARFIELD: And Tom Wolfe, the novelist and new journalism--

STEPHANIE McLUHAN:That's right. And at the time, Tom was still writing only non-fiction, and wrote this article, What If He's Right? The Greatest Thinker Since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov. He was on every major cover of every magazine. He was in newspapers. And where can you go from there? You can't maintain that.

BOB GARFIELD:What I'd like you to do for me, then, is just to give us a little tutorial on some of the more famous McLuhan concepts, and we'll start with an easy one: the global village.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Well, he really went out of his way to say that the global village was created by the instant speed of electronic information movement. He went on to say that the reason that he called it a global village was that space is reduced to almost nothing, so that you had this sense of being very connected. Now, I don't have difficulty with that. Do you?

BOB GARFIELD: No. Let's move on to a slightly more elusive concept, and that is hot and cool media.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN:He would talk about radio as hot and by a hot medium, he meant conducive or congenial to people like Rush Limbaugh, for example. Hot medium to also mean that you'd sort of get a quick fix, that you'd get like the highlights of the day -- in contrast to television which he labeled as a cool medium, but by cool he meant involving participatory and would favor programs that had sort of a, a ritual or a serial quality to them. So immediately I think of-- well certainly reality programs like Survivor, American Idol - that's what he meant by television is cool, and radio didn't necessarily do that.

BOB GARFIELD:This leads into the most famous utterance: the medium is the message. Stephanie, at long last, what the hell was he talking about?

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Well, you, you know you don't need to get exasperated by this. The medium is the message is simply the environment created by any new innovation, any new technology, was the thing that changed people; not the technology. The technology in and of itself was neutral. And if you just think about the internet - I mean internet had been around for academics and scientists and the Defense Department way, way before 1992/93 when we began to hook up, so the internet was being used. It's the on-line environment that was created after '92, '93, '94 by all of us that has utterly changed our ways of communicating.

BOB GARFIELD:At one point, in a lecture, he was talking about the laws of the media, and he, he brought them down to four fundamental laws, and he tried to explain them with a zipper, and I gotta tell you-- even after hearing how the zipper was an example of a medium changing the environment, I'm still trying to figure out how a zipper is a medium.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Well-- the zipper, I'm, I'm not sure whether I can do the zipper, but let me try. His four laws were that any new technology enhanced something. In the case of the zipper, help me out here--

BOB GARFIELD: Yes, it, it-- it amplifies or enhances - it obsolesces--

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: -- it retrieves something from the, from the distant past--

STEPHANIE McLUHAN:And flips into the opposite form. So first of all, obsolesces, you're right. So it would have obsolesced all the snaps and hooks and whatever it was you used to get, yourself together before the zipper, so it would obsolesce those. Enhance -- I mean I can offhand say it would certainly enhance your getting dressed, but that's not what he would admit. I think retrieves or remembers - he said retrieved long, flowing robes -- well, with a zipper, obviously to be able to zip up a long, you know, a long gown, whether it was for a man or a woman, for whatever reason, this makes some sense. And flipped into its opposite form, and I think he said velcro. But I don't, you know, I'm, again, I'm not a scholar, a communications scholar, and so the laws of the media are something I haven't worked out for myself, and that is a particularly difficult example.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Stephanie. Well, thank you very much.

STEPHANIE McLUHAN: Bob, it's been great talking to you,

BOB GARFIELD:Documentarian Stephanie McLuhan is the co-editor with David Staines of Understanding Me: The Collected Lectures and Interviews of the Late Marshall McLuhan.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up: prying by search engine, lying by cell phone, and tying the knot, in sexually diverse action video games.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.