MCLUHAN AND MASS EDUCATION. UNIVERSITY AS "TEACHING MACHINE"

Abstract

This paper focuses on some aspects of McLuhan's educational reflection, that does not neglect the evolution of the higher education institutions in the age of technological accelerations. Specifically, McLuhan is deeply aware of the particular phase in which universities are no longer elitist functional systems and become a mass educational industry. This is the interpretative perspective of McLuhan's interest for the processes of innovation in the field of higher education, highlighting the socio-cultural, political and productive shifts peculiar of the economic prosperity age. The heuristic aim of the paper is to deepen the knowledge of McLuhan's sociology of University. The latter is a significant field of study, especially in regard to the mediological research fostered in Understanding Media (1964), where his style makes him appear as a dowser of research. From this perspective, such an interpretative approach allows one to highlight the relationship between "the teaching machine" and the interactional practices introduced by new technologies, which make the symbolic universes of daily life subject to fluctuations that have become permanent.

Headnote

Abstract: This paper focuses on some aspects of McLuhan's educational reflection, that does not neglect the evolution of the higher education institutions in the age of technological accelerations. Specifically, McLuhan is deeply aware of the particular phase in which universities are no longer elitist functional systems and become a mass educational industry. This is the interpretative perspective of McLuhan's interest for the processes of innovation in the field of higher education, highlighting the socio-cultural, political and productive shifts peculiar of the economic prosperity age.

The heuristic aim of the paper is to deepen the knowledge of McLuhan's sociology of University. The latter is a significant field of study, especially in regard to the mediological research fostered in Understanding Media (1964), where his style makes him appear as a dowser of research. From this perspective, such an interpretative approach allows one to highlight the relationship between "the teaching machine" and the interactional practices introduced by new technologies, which make the symbolic universes of daily life subject to fluctuations that have become permanent.

Keywords: Marshall McLuhan, higher education, sociology of university, communicative innovation.

McLuhan and the myth of the automated University

In reference to the analysis of the use and diffusion of mass media in the age of the acceleration of informative processes and the demolition of spatial and temporal barriers, McLuhan extends his survey to the interactional innovations produced by the advent of the mass society and the consequent socio-cultural changes, which are strongly tied to the changes of symbolic universes, of value categories and of the experiential declinations of the contemporary age1.

McLuhan has no doubts about the consequences that such changes imply for educational processes, bound to meet educational and cognitive instances that might keep pace with the functional evolution of a society projected towards the new challenges of globalization. In fact, mediality and education are strictly related, as the recent reforms promoted in the Italian university system show2. Education has not only the task to introduce good practices in terms of quality, efficiency, assessment and accountability, but it also needs to conform to the new communicative trends peculiar of the digital age. This process has direct consequences on teaching and research methods, in accordance with the marketing strategies of universities3.

Also for these reasons, a process of rationalization has been started. This process ranges from the organization of learning courses to professors and researchers' recruitment. This process is also a consequence of the reduction of funds available due to the economic crisis, which unavoidably affects investments on education and the valorization of human capital. Thus, the metaphor of university as a "marketplace" becomes a possible interpretative key of the innovations acknowledged by higher education systems in the age marked by the globalization of knowledge, digitalized communicative interactions, and a value crisis that Bauman's individualized society lives today because of the great cultural revolutions of post-modernity4.

Industry as a whole has become the unit of reckoning, and so with society, politics, and education as wholes. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past5.

In his main works, McLuhan deals with the social consequences tied to the diffusion of new forms of automation and to the shifts imposed by the cultural industry at the dawn of globalization6. Specifically, in the conclusive pages of Understanding Media, focused on the communicative changes engendered by the advent of modernity, he lingers on the educational innovations introduced by the technological speed-up of the Sixties. This is an historical phase characterized by the diffusion of the cultural industry and media, bound to produce new socio-cultural phenomena. The economic prosperity marks a fundamental turning point not only in communicative practices, but also in the behavioral habits of social actors, in productive processes, in educational practices, and in the modalities of cultural consumption. These aspects involve cinema, radio, art, music, and journalism.

Society as a whole is endowed with structural and functional changes that are so much epochal. In the foreground, there are direct consequences for the re-placing and re-definition of the value and symbolic frameworks of reality:

The very idea of communication as interplay is inherent in the electrical, which combines both energy and information in its intensive manifold. Anybody who begins to examine the patterns of automation finds its perfecting the individual machine by making it automatic involves "feedback". That means introducing an information loop or circuit, where before there had been merely a one-way flow or mechanical sequence. Feedback is the end of the lineality that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space. Feedback or dialogue between the mechanism and its environment brings a further weaving of individual machines into a galaxy of such machines throughout the entire plant. There follows a still further weaving of individual plants and factories into the entire industrial matrix of materials and services of culture. Naturally, this last stage encounters the entire world of policy, since to deal with the whole industrial complex as an organic system affects employment, security, education, and politics, demanding full understanding in advance of coming structural change. There is no room for witless assumptions and subliminal factors in such electrical and instant organizations7.

Since the "medium is the message", it is possible to interpret the shifts imposed by modernity according to new educational paradigms, which ought to respond to the social indications defined by the early society of knowledge. Educational institutions are about to carry out a new social and communicative task. Both schools and universities are about to define their own cultural endeavor, according to new and unforeseen heuristic instances, bound to foster an attentive reflection on the organization of the didactic system, the structure of governance, the relationships with working actors, the synergies with the environment they belong to, the role of professors, the right to study8. These are all aspects that, from McLuhan's perspective, gain a fundamental strategic meaning in regard to the planning of funds and the discharge of an educational request destined to increase exponentially with the advent of mass and democratic universities in the twenty-first century.

A much more modern and dynamic university looms on the horizon. Derrida would talk about a university with "no strings attached"9. Like productive organizations, university, conceived as a breeding ground of knowledge and culture, must face the great innovations introduced on multiple levels by electric automation, which implies a reliable reassessment of the socio-cultural mission peculiar of an institution born and developed in the Middle Ages.

Starting from its birth, university had to indulge the several shifts engendered by progress, which, since the industrial revolution, has been having a frenetic pace involving all the sectors of public and private life. In compliance with the versatility of productive processes and a faster diffusion of disciplines (enhanced by the advent of electric mass media, both cold and hot according to their capabilities of involving the audience), the social role of individuals undergoes deep changes, above all a progressive fragmentation of experience bound to affect the social relationships built by actors in the electric age.

Therefore, society acquires a computational value, ruled by the new religion of calculation developed thanks to the diffusion of new mass media, especially the telephone: "Industry as a whole has become the unit of reckoning, and so with society, politics, and education as wholes". Well ahead of the globalization era, ruled by statistic elaborations aimed at interpreting reality by the means of qualitative and quantitative patterns, McLuhan foresees the advent of a mass society inspired by the principle of productivity, functional efficiency, and communicative effectiveness10.

Moreover, he emphasizes the full educational prerogatives of the mass society. In order to check its heuristic soundness it is necessary to trust the numbers, not only for industry, transports and engineering, but also for education. In fact, education is a field deeply modified by the social influence of the cultural industry and the advent of the new knowledge society:

Now that man has extended his central nervous system by electric technology, the field of battle has shifted to mental image-making-and-breaking, both in war and in business. Until the electric age, higher education has been a privilege and a luxury for the leisured classes; today it has become a necessity for production and survival. Now, when information itself is the main traffic, the need for advanced knowledge presses on the spirits of the most the most routine-ridden minds. So sudden an upsurge of academic training into the marketplace has in it the quality of classical peripety or reversal, and the result has been a wild guffaw from the gallery and the campus. The hilarity, however, will die down as the Executive Suites are taken over by the Ph.D.s.11

In the beginning there was the manuscript, conceived as an expression of an elitist culture, prerogative of a learned class. This socially appreciated class had the chance to study in medieval libraries and monasteries imbued with Scholasticism12. As remarked by McLuhan, universities were born in this precise historical moment and became soon cultural engines functioning above temporal institutions, social bonds, doctrinal disputes, spatial and temporal boundaries, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the influence still exerted by the classical culture.

University slowly looms as a socially legitimated cognitive hotbed, also thanks to the contribution of relevant personalities in the fields of theology, law, sciences, and philosophy. However, it is quite clear that, until the invention of press, the use of specialized knowledge (as in the case of manuscripts handed down by both laic and religious skillful amanuenses) is reserved to an elitist cultural circuit, confined within the boundaries of great cultural centers, accessible provided that great financial resources are available.

After Gutenberg's invention, social life is destined to deeply change. As the diffusion of knowledge increases, symbolic reticulates change too, together with experiential values and the cognitive possibilities of a society increasingly projected towards the definition of new heuristic models and needful to interpret the shifting forms of reality. McLuhan describes one of the fundamental principles of his sociological theory based on the lesson of the past: "All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information"13. The new cognitive inputs determined by the unstoppable advance of technology cause a re-adjustment of the expressive and cultural codices ruling sociality, projected towards new interactional approaches. McLuhan's statement can be much more shared nowadays. The genius of Gutenberg is shaded by the inventions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who loom as the expression of a modernity bound to exploit diffused connectivity as a sheer social habitus, capable of influencing habits, behaviors, and reflective praxis.

Needless to remark, e-books are just the last manifestation of an increasingly digitalized progress. Its feature is to reconvert the communicative habits of an information society constantly changing. McLuhan deals with an incoming society bound to be nourished by images and symbols. At the same time, society has rediscovered (as Roland Barthes would point out) the "pleasure of text" and the performing capability of words, re-semanticized by the new communicative environments molded by social networking sites, smart phones, and tablets. The global village outlined by McLuhan has finally taken form, involving all the aspects of social life, education included. After all, the digital revolution has been interiorized by universities too, thanks to an external sensitivity without precedents for universities, traditionally reticent to accept meddling or public accounts14.

Universities and the visual evolution of knowledge

Everything changes along with technological acceleration, increasing international mobility and the globalization of knowledge, which make the university medieval paradigm obsolete. Universities are no longer guardians of a vested knowledge, especially in our times, ruled by the unavoidable informative influence of television, become almost invasive. It is quite clear that universities, in order to keep their cultural identity, cannot limit themselves to a weak mechanical transmission of knowledge. They risk neglecting the vortex of changes destined to influence educational praxis itself15. They should allow the youth to access labor, politics, and society. It is not possible to be resistant to unavoidable reform processes, especially in an age marked by the perishable nature of knowledge:

In the same way the excessive tactile effects of the TV image cannot be met by mere program changes. Imaginative strategy based on adequate diagnosis would prescribe a corresponding depth or structural approach to the existing literary and visual world. If we persist in a conventional approach to these developments out traditional culture will be swept aside as scholasticism was in the sixteenth century. Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet the new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are now beginning to explain16.

In comparison with Gutenberg's times, the academic world has learnt to manage the visual evolutions of knowledge. Furthermore, the academic system has learnt to interpret the changes of social iconography, to express semiotic displays of an education that celebrates the Internet and digital devices, more than traditional paper supports. For this reasons, the incoming university of our times acquires the polyhedral form of an excellence system that attempts to face the expectations of new student generations, submerged in the digital revolution of the Internet17. At the same time, students risk to get lost in an increasingly liquid and connected modernity.

After all, universities (at least in Italy) fight against the chronic problems permeating a reformist season that has become almost permanent, because of a financial crisis that does not seem to have been tackled yet18. As a matter of fact, the shift towards a "marketplace" approach makes universities sheer productive systems, with direct consequences in terms of visibility, marketing, and attractiveness. It is quite undeniable that university education has not promptly faced the challenge of innovation enhanced by the digital revolution. It is also a fact that such old institutions (as well as the Church) have usually different patterns in comparison with other functional systems. Basically, these institutions are used to conceive technological innovation as a hallmark of their own activity.

Compared to the Middle Ages, universities are no longer an exclusive prerogative of well-off classes, since they are bound to satisfy the educational needs of the mass society. Knowledge travels over the Internet. This is the new revolution that McLuhan would have connected to the epochal one fostered by the press. Its invention determined deep changes in university teaching:

Typography was no more an addition to the scribal art than the motorcar was an addition to the horse. Printing had its "horseless carriage" phase of being misconceived and misapplied during its first decades, when it was not uncommon for the purchaser of a printed book to take it to a scribe to have it copied and illustrated. Even in the early eighteenth century a "textbook" was still defined as a "Classick Author written very wide by the Studens, to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines" (O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time in school and college classrooms was spent in making such texts. The classroom tended to be a scriptorium with a commentary. The student was an editor-publisher. By the same token the book market was a secondhand market of relatively scarce items. Printing changed learning and marketing processes alike. The book was the first teaching machine and also the first mass-produced commodity. In amplifying and extending the written world, typography revealed and greatly extended the structure of writing19.

In the Internet age, the structure of writing gets more dynamic by the means of fluctuant and shifting communicative flows, framed in speaking contexts increasingly in progress. Long after scribes and amanuenses, communicative actors (both students and professors) have replaced the typographic art with the keyboards of tablets, which allow writing to assume the expected form almost in real time. At the same time, new electric tools have knocked down spatial and temporal barriers that were once insurmountable. It is evident that such a communicative eagerness needs the proper educational substrate, which has become indispensable to take part to the public sphere as recently described by Habermas20.

Nowadays, university faces a new season of changes, determined by a digital revolution that has no boundaries. This is the era of the assessment of research products submitted in pdf format. This is the time of electronic bulletin boards, of examination commissions that work in a digital way, and of e-learning courses. E-learning offers a great deal of educational chances, becoming an added value for experimentation and use of knowledge. As a result, McLuhan highlights the central role that writing has played (and still plays today) in educational processes, despite the evolution of learning supports and devices.

According to McLuhan, the book "the first teaching machine and also the first mass-produced commodity". Nevertheless, it has no longer an independent existence. This happens because a classroom (or a library) cannot be imagined as a space crowded by students deprived of their own laptops or tablets, which they use to consult sources, information, and integrative documents and are therefore bound to implement their study. Medieval students, constantly talking to the studied authors that are both publishers and writers, are replaced by postmodern students submerged in the liquid complexity of the twenty-first century. The latter is ruled by an unceasing technological acceleration, which makes any instrumental support obsolete and incapable of keeping pace with innovation. This discourse is valid for educational systems as well as for the cultural industry, bound to indulge the instances of entertainment peculiar of a too much globalized society21:

Today, with the cinema and the electric speedup of information movement, the formal structure of the printed word, as of mechanism in general, stands forth like a branch washed up on the beach. A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called "scholasticism" at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in front of any given number of students or readers print ended the scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate22.

The advent of modernity makes medieval oral disputations, the Renaissance paradigm of typographic interlocution and the morning habit of getting information from newspapers obsolete. In the foreground, there is the strengthening of the knowledge society, which does not succeed in keeping pace with hectic technological speedups, fostered by increasingly immediate and compulsive cultural consumptions23. The sociological scenario might be more complete by taking into account also the evasion instances nourished by the value (and economic) crisis of our times and the several communicative contexts offered by the Internet.

Surely, these are the most evident effects of a profound transformation process that is hard to understand. In the light of this evolution, university aims at gaining back the guide role it played in the previous centuries. Nevertheless, this role has weakened, also due to several criticalities, such as the lack of representativeness and accountability, the protection of corporative interests, and the excessive self-reference that historically marks academic institutions.

In the age of globalization, universities risk to lose the authority given by a secular history and a conscious practice of knowledge, as opportunely outlined by Bauman:

This is, roughly, the gist of the present crisis: with virtually all orthodox grounds and justifications of their once elevated position either gone or considerably weakened, universities (at least in the developed and affluent countries - in the 'modernizing' countries they may still play the traditional role of factories supplying a heretofore missing educated elite) face the need to rethink and articulate anew their role in a world that has no use for their traditional services, sets new rules for the game of prestige and influence, and views with growing suspicion the values they stood for24.

Education as "civil defense against media fall-out"

The diffusion of new digital communications attests the growth of the virtual square of the Internet. For instance, universities themselves make use of social networking sites in order to increase their visibility and improve their informative services for students. As a result, writing gains new expressive functions, in the light of a functional re-configuration stemming from the digital revolution. All these facts have direct consequences on accessibility and participation to the university life, in terms of a democracy that should be more reliable than it was in the past. But is this really the case? Are we really in the presence of the "University in the democracy" as pointed out by Habermas at the dawn of the 1968 revolution? The social diversification of university users seems to mingle with the unexpected fragmentation of communicative experiences, enhanced by the individual management of relations projected on social networking sites.

The relational dynamics that mark university systems in the age of the web 2.0 make no exception, despite the destruction of spatial and temporal barriers and the globalization of communicative flows. Nowadays, students are cybernetic actors who conceive computers as extensions of their own nervous system, as a ramified appendix of their own body structure. Digitalized students have replaced pencils, pens and white chalk with keyboards, from the smallest and immaterial ones of mobile phones to the bigger ones of laptops.

Even keys or buttons are now replaced by new touch-screens, which have completely dematerialized the act of writing, compelled to change structure and form, without losing its communicative dimension that has always characterized social existence. In order to understand new communicative platforms it is necessary to analyze the evolution of writing and learn their semantic and expressive complexity, as it happened in the medieval scriptorium, where the dialogue with studied authors was a stylistic and cognitive exercise, rather than exegetic. This is the task that education is charged with: provide students with the fundamental interpretative tools of a society nourished by a great deal of images and information without precedents in the history of humanity, bound to face the globalization of knowledge25. It follows the need to interpret ever-changing languages, stemming from rapid and fluctuant value shifts:

Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, non education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condescension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment". It was in this spirit of bulldog opacity that the scholastic philosophers failed to meet the challenge of the printed book in the sixteenth century. The vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been by-passed and engulfed by new media. The study of this process, however, whether for the purpose of fixity or of change, has scarcely begun26.

On the one hand, McLuhan argues that universities realized too late the meaning of the social and expressive changes introduced first by the cultural industry and then by the digital revolution. On the other hand, he points out that there is no other educational institution capable of elaborating and proposing cultural solutions suitable to the dominion of the culture of images diffused by media. This new visual dimension is often transformed into a mere consumer good, available in any season for all interlocutors. Therefore, university systems must exploit as much as possible their own identity heritage and international prestige to become relevant socio-cultural actors, in a communicative scenario that does not seem to offer lasting cognitive features. It follows the need to conserve and divulge the great knowledge inherited from the past according to original educational approaches, renewed according to the heuristic dictates imposed by the society of information27.

The dialectic relationship between innovation and tradition, in which innovation is the strongest pole, must assume a new functional balance, bound to contrast the "fall out of media" highlighted by McLuhan well ahead of the communicative explosion engendered by the advent of broadband networks and smart phones. In the age of diffused connectivity, knowledge, education, and study should be the best defense (not only civil, but also intellectual) against the invasive action carried out by the cultural industry in regard to shared behaviors, relational praxis and informative paradigms. The pursuit of the changes fostered by new digital media (about to foster significant inclusive chances even in the educational field) carried out by universities confirms, on the one hand, the awareness of the system to indulge the challenge of innovation imposed by modernity. On the other hand, it shows that "The vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been by-passed and engulfed by new media". Universities embody the greatest expression of this innovation process in the didactic field.

This discourse may also concern the Church in the institutional field, as well as public research organizations and historical academies in the cultural field. Fifty years after McLuhan's analysis, university systems are undergoing a deep process of change, inspired also by a greater availability of scientific and technological innovations belonging to an extra academic area. This process is characterized by the awareness about a-historicity, which marks the apparent refusal to collaborate of the last years.

Thus, it is not surprising that mass culture has become a permanent subject of study of university research, which attempts to interpret the signs of renewal according to the social shifts nourished by the digital revolution. Two aspects emphasized by McLuhan are fully evident nowadays: the multi-disciplinary nature of many professional sectors and the functional versatility of several branches of knowledge. These two aspects call for the construction of an open, dynamic and up-to-date educational strategy. As a result, science must face the de-specialization of the civil society, expected to find jobs and work environments that are no longer stable due to the economic crisis:

The world of science has become quite self-conscious about the play element in its endless experiments with models of situations otherwise unobservable. Management training centers have long used games as a means of developing new business perception. John Kenneth Galbraith argues that business must now study art, for the artist makes models of problems and situations that have not yet emerged in the larger matrix of society, giving the artistically perceptive businessman a decade of leeway in his planning.

In the electric age, the closing of the gaps between art and business, or between campus and community, are part of the overall implosion that closes the ranks of specialists at all levels. Flaubert, the French novelist of the nineteenth century, felt that the Franco-Prussian War could have been avoided if people had heeded his Sentimental Education. A similar feeling has since come to be widely held by artists. They know that they are engaged in making live models of situations that have not yet matured in the society at large. In their artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus they appear to be "ahead of their time". Non-artists always look at the present through the spectacles of the preceding age. General staffs are always magnificently prepared to fight the previous war28.

The reference to Flaubert attests the strategic role played by interdisciplinarity, educational contamination, and cultural syncretism, also in those contexts apparently impermeable to external interferences. After all, the university management has realized the impossibility to delay the renewal process imposed by globalization. Furthermore, the promotion of the Bologna Process represents the attempt (partly achieved) to make universities innovative and reliable modern educational systems29 (Cowen 2000).

The new challenge concerns the increase in the quality and efficiency of didactics, together with the purpose (much more ambitious) to enhance services for students and for research activities, despite the progressive cutbacks of financial resources. This factor unavoidably hampers the process of democratization of university systems, imposed by the advent of post-modernity. This means that universities cannot afford to look "at the present through the spectacles of the preceding age", or to consider human capital in specialized terms. It follows that multiculturalism, globalization, and interdisciplinarity require a much more dynamic, interactive, and transversal approach, as the phenomenon of the humanistic graduate increasingly sought after by private companies shows.

In conclusion. McLuhan and key concepts of university reformism

The post-modern age is about to make education a "unit of reckoning", subject to rigid rules and competition. Universities pose as functional systems engaged with profound "structural change" and the "the need for advanced knowledge". Furthermore, communication turns into an interdisciplinary educational process, aimed at overcoming the "present patterns of fragmented unrelation". As a result, schools become dynamic learning environments, compelled to refuse "the fragmentary and piecemeal character of mechanism". Finally, the "decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers" loom as the concrete programmatic solution to the increasing educational demand of the Sixties.

These are only some of McLuhan's insights about the reform of the educational and cultural processes of his times, marked by the transition from elitist educational systems to mass training industries. His insights are still relevant nowadays, since they pose significant questions to educational actors, engaged in the definition of new teaching strategies. McLuhan has no doubt about the functional priorities of universities. After all, the advent of modernity implies the re-interpretation of socio-educational instances and the change of productive processes. McLuhan points out the need to analyze the evolution of cultural consumption, the communicative revolution boosted by new media and the increasingly interconnection of knowledge. All these factors found the current harmonization process of higher educational systems, i.e. the Bologna Process30.

McLuhan succeeded in foreseeing the fragmentation of study courses and teachings, university delocalization, the influence of new communicative practices on the way to teach and to do research work, and the divide between education and labor market. "The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age". This is one of the tasks universities are charged with also in regard to the communicative strategies, transparency and accountability.

As the circularity of knowledge rises to a hallmark of digitalized training processes, McLuhan's sociological engagement gains a new heuristic value. As a matter of fact, he proposes to intertwine educational experiences and social facts, in order to face the problems linked to the permanent change of daily symbolic universes: "But automation forces not only industry and town planners, but government and even education, to come into some relation to social facts". This is one of the several warnings bequeathed by McLuhan to the medial university of our times, involved in the tough endeavor of assessment, merit, and transparency. In the foreground, there is the ever-changing dematerialized society, where the "formal structure of the printed word" is bound to profound be changed by the Internet, thanks to a renewed expressive nexus between medium and message31.

Footnote

1 On the relationship between higher education and social innovation see R. Cavell Richard, McLuhan in Space: Cultural Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto 2003; G. Wilmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse, University of Toronto, Toronto 1996.

2 For further information about the process of academic innovation in Italy see, in particular, A. Masia, M. Morcellini, (eds.), L'Università al futuro. Sistema, progetto, innovazione, Giuffrè editore, Milano 2009.

3 Paul Axelrod analyzed the evolution of University systems into sheer "marketplaces". See his University in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace and the Trials of Liberal Education, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & Kingstone, London, Ithaca 2002.

4 Zygmunt Bauman successfully remarked the social consequences peculiar of liquid society in terms of individualization of social act: Z. Bauman, The Individualized Society, Polity Press, Cambridge (UK) 2001.

5 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Men (1964), edited by W. Terrence Gordon, Gingko Press, Corte Madera (CA) 2003, pages 472-473. McLuhan's theory has been highly influenced by Harold A. Innis. In regard to the evolution of university systems, it might be worth reading Innis' essay written in 1947, Adult Education and Universities, in Id., The Bias of Communication, II edition, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2008, pages 203-214. It might be also worth noting that the year before the publication of Understanding media, Parsons published his study on young American education: Talcott Parsons, Youth in the Context of American Society, «American Sociological Review», vol. 27, 1963, pages 97-123.

6 Terence Gordon has clearly emphasized McLuhan's interest in analyzing the consequences of medial revolution: Gordon W. Terence, McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, London-New York 2010.

7 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 468.

8 For further investigation: N. Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Delacorte Press, New York 1979; J. Habermas, Universitätstage 1967, Universität und Demokratie, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1967; T. Parsons, The School Class as a Social System: Some of its Functions in American Society, in «Harvard Educational Review», 29, 1959, pages 297-318.

9 The reference is to J. Derrida, L'Université sans condition, Éditions Galilée, Paris 2001; Eng. tr.: The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. A Critical Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) 2002, pages 24-57.

10 On the relationship between mass society and communicative speedup in McLuhan's surveys it might be worth reading R. Cavell, McLuhan in Space: Cultural Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto 2003.

11 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 142.

12 In his historical reflections McLuhan dealt with the educational strategies peculiar of Medieval Ages: M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), with new essays by W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, University of Toronto Press, Toronto Buffalo London 2011, pages. 107-120.

13 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 269.

14 On the educational shifts bolstered by the advent of digital communities see R. Barnett, Imagining the University, Routledge, London-New York 2013; J. Biggs, C. Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does, McGraw Hill, Maidenhead-New York 20114.

15 This is what the book of John Bowden and Ference Marton purposes to point out: The University of Learning: Beyond Quality and Competence, Routledge, London-New York 1998.

16 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 103.

17 In reference to the advent of communicative society in the era of medial complexity it might be worth reading H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, New York-London 2006; D. De Kerckhove, Connected Intelligence: the Arrival of the Web Society, Somerville House Publ., Toronto 1997.

18 For further information on the criticalities of hyper-reformism in Italian higher education systems see A. Lombardinilo, Building University. In una società aperta e competitiva, Armando editore, Roma 2014.

19 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pages 236-237.

20 The reference is to J. Habermas, Ach, Europa. Kleine Politische Schriften XI (2008), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main; Eng. tr.: Europe: The Faltering Project, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009.

21 On the educational shifts peculiar of our complexity see R. Cowen, E. Klerides, «Mobilities and Educational Metamorphoses: Patterns, Puzzles, and Possibilities» [Special issue], Comparative Education, 45(3), 2009.

22 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 237.

23 On the different cognitive functions of universities in the era of post-modernity see C. Kerr, The Uses of University, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA)-London 20015.

24Z. Bauman, The Present Crisis of the Universities, in J. Brzezinski, N. Leszek (eds.), The Idea of the University, Rodopi, Amsterdam 1997, p. 51.

25 On the heuristic convergence between cultural features and interactional skills it might be worth radon R. K. Logan, Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan, Peter Lang, New York 2010.

26 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 264.

27Paul Levinson dealt with McLuhan's informative sensitivity at the dawn of global village of information: Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, Routledge, New York-London 1999.

28McLuhan, Understanding Media, pages 324-325.

29This is an aspect clearly emphasized by Robert Cowen in reference to the marketing strategies of Universities: «The market-framed university: The new ethics of the game», in J. Cairns, R. Gardner e D. Lawton (eds.), Values and curriculum, Woburn Press, London 2000, pages 93-105.

30 For further investigation see G. Neave, The Evaluative State. Institutional Autonomy and Re-engineering Higher Education in Western Europe. The Prince and His Pleasure, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2012.

31 G. Gamaleri, La nuova galassia McLuhan: Vivere l'implosione del pianeta, Armando, Roma 2013.

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