The McLuhan Newsletter

Now Boarding

I spent a considerable amount of energy over the last year on this notion of a new McLuhan Newsletter. In a perfect world, it would be somewhat of a reboot and resurfacing of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘DEW-Line Newsletter’ with other things thrown in including contributions from people other than myself.

In that perfect world, it would be a hybrid physical (paid) and digital (free) offering - the same content published online and also in print to be sent to subscribers’ homes.

It turns out we do not live in the perfect world of my dreams.

I did manage to speak with real people in the real big magazine business, and though they were enthusiastic and supportive, the business case was not there. If I had social media followings counted in millions of people, that would be a different story.

This idea of a hybrid newsletter is not to be, at least not right now. But I don’t want to wait to start putting things out there, so … let’s do this. (I guess you could print it out and put it in an envelope and pretend I sent it to you?)

I have, at the moment, 330 free subscriptions to this … thing. And, I’ve just turned on the paid subscription offering at $5/month. It remains to be seen whether any or how many will ‘convert’ from free to paid.

I don’t like paywalls.

My work with The McLuhan Institute is all about accessibility and the removal of barriers: physical, intellectual, economic.

So - you can receive this newsletter for free, or you can support it to the tune of $5 a month. Either way you’ll get the same content, but there’s only one way to support my work and my lofty ambitions for The McLuhan Institute — the only place in the world dedicated solely to preserving and bringing forward the work of Marshall and Eric McLuhan (my grandfather and father if you hadn’t figured that out).

I’m probably going to change the name soon. ‘McLuhan Studies’ was a journal edited by Eric McLuhan. They actually did publish a single first volume/edition, followed by four more web-only editions. Maybe I cursed this thing by using that name.

I was going to call the hybrid thing ‘The McLuhan Instigator’ and I might still go there (TMI and all that) but I think it will be just ‘The McLuhan Newsletter’ for now.

What about content?!

Yes, content. It does matter.

I’m going to open with a bit of a banger.

delivering ‘Maelstrom Escape Strategies’ at the Gray Area Festival in San Francisco, Fall 2022.

’Maelstrom Escape Strategies’ is a thing I wrote last year thanks in part to a grant from Reggie James of Eternal. He/they have generously agreed to let me ‘open source it.’ I will start things off with this newsletter by serializing ‘Maelstrom Escape Strategies’ for a few reasons. For one, I want to get it out there because I think it needs to be out there. For another, I have been even less successful in finding a publisher for it than I have for the proposed physical newsletter.

Serializing MES should take care of several issues’ worth of content, and I’ll put them out weekly for starters. What will follow? How frequently? Good questions. I still like the idea of a roundup of highlights of McLuhan things from my week’s work, strung together with commentary to help shed light. I’m not sure it will always be weekly, but certainly at least monthly. I’d love to have guest contributions but I’m not sure I can ask people to work for free so if people don’t $ubscribe, that’s unlikely.

If you have ideas, feel free to drop a comment.

I guess that’s it for now. I’m going to be busy for a while chopping MES into digestible bits. I hope you’ll check back in and support this exploration.

Take care,
Andrew McLuhan