Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum by Gary Genosko

How to explain the subheading of this book? The McLuhan of the Museum? For the past three decades, critiques of literary and social narratives have been increasingly dominated by concerns about identity and power. Who is telling the story? Who isn’t included in the story? Less concern has been paid to how the story is being told. Put another way, sociological questions about content have dominated aesthetic questions about form.

But 60 years ago, when Parker and University of Toronto professor Marshall McLuhan were at the height of their cultural influence, form, they said, determines content. Or as McLuhan put it memorably, the medium is the message. McLuhan, the visionary, was an English professor steeped in High Modernism and what we might broadly call communications theory.

McLuhan saw how Modernist fragmentation connected to the rise of electronic media – in his day, the telegraph, radio, and television. It’s for good reason that Wired Magazine named McLuhan the “Patron Saint of the Internet.” His speculations about form and content, hot and cold media, medium and message seemed to presage the hyperlinked functions of the browser, where the logocentrism of the printed page broke easily into disjointed user experiences. The experience was the content, McLuhan hinted, not the words or images.

Parker was a professional designer, coming from the magazine and art world, who also worked as an academic. He designed displays for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and frequently stood in for McLuhan as a speaker and explainer of the visionaries, well, vision. They collaborated notoriously on the book Counterblast (1969), which had a different typeface on every page and turned text into swirls, diagrams, all sorts of non-linear presentations.

In his museum displays, Parker did likewise. One notable display was the ROM’s Hall of Fossils. He also theorized about how Museumology could be McLuhanesque: non-linear, fragmented, open to wider, less literal user experiences. Genosko remarkably tracks down Parker’s unpublished book on the subject in a box held by one of Parker’s children. It was subsequently published: The Culture Box (2025).

Genosko’s walk through all this material shows the patience of a specialist. The questions he tackles and the world he presents is complicated and was sometimes bewildering to this general reader. Nonetheless, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum is a fascinating book – even an occasionally mind-blowing McLuhan/Parkereque experience. One need only be open to it.

Gary Genosko is Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University. He has published extensively on Continental thought, communication modelling, administrative surveillance, critical semiotics, and the lives of scholarly journals. His books include McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion and When Technocultures Collide. He also edited a critical edition of Harley Parker’s The Culture Box (with University of Alberta Press).

Publisher: University of Alberta Press (May 15, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 268 pages
ISBN: 9781772127935

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.