One is bowled over by their originality

An essay Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? by Alan Jacobs.

McLuhan has been lurking in the background of my reading and thoughts for probably a couple of decades. He is probably most famous for the assertion that the medium is the message. I have shied away from any serious reading of his work in part because the small sampling I did seemed to indicate intriguing but incoherent thought and partly I avoided him because he seemed to be too popular. As a rule of thumb, I am prone to believe that those who are the toast of the chattering classes are probably not legitimately rewarding to read. Not a universally true rule but one that is usefully accurate.

This essay fills in some of the blanks and confirms that it was proper to be skeptical but also makes the case that there is some value of selectively investigating some of McLuhan's work.

Some of McLuhan's prognostications:

Pope has not received his due as a serious analyst of the intellectual malaise of Europe.... Supported by the Gutenberg technology, the power of the dunces to shape and befog the human intellect is unlimited.

Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age.

The medium is the message.

The global village.

Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.

Jacobs description of the issue with McLuhan is:

It is easy to come to dismissive conclusions when dealing with a thinker as distinctive as McLuhan. W. H. Auden once wrote of Kierkegaard that he

is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion.

McLuhan is also one of those writers, and the difficulty of estimating him justly is exacerbated by his one-time status as an international intellectual celebrity, appearing regularly on bestseller lists, jetting from place to place to give lectures to adoring crowds, appearing on television talk shows, and running an institute devoted to his own ideas at the University of Toronto.

I think Jacobs is on the mark when he comes to the conclusion that the value of McLuhan is more in his role as a catalyst to others' thinking rather than as a consistent and articulate conceptualizer himself.