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Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, who is one of the founders of the study of media ecology.

Biography

Early life

Born Herbert Marshall McLuhan, in Edmonton, Alberta, to Herbert and Elsie (née Hall). The McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, while Marshall was still a young child. While in Winnipeg, McLuhan would earn a BA and MA in English, after a one year stint as an engineering major, at the University of Manitoba. McLuhan later enrolled at the University of Cambridge. There, he would study under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and was influenced by New Criticism. Upon reflection later, he credited the faculty there for being chiefly concerned with the training of perception. This application finds resonance throughout his work, as do occasionally such notions of Richards' from the 1930s as feedforward.

During the 1936-37 academic year, McLuhan taught as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. On March 30, 1937, McLuhan culminated what was a slow but total conversion process when he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church. Subsequently, he taught in Roman Catholic institutions of higher education. From 1937 to 1944 he taught English at Saint Louis University. There he taught and befriended Walter J. Ong (1912-2003), who would go on to do his Ph.D. dissertation on a topic McLuhan had called to his attention, and who would himself also later become a well-known authority on communication and technology. On August 4, 1939, McLuhan married Corinne Lewis of Fort Worth, Texas, and they spent 1939-40 at Cambridge University, where he continued to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. From 1944 to 1946 McLuhan taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.

From 1946 to 1979 he taught at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, where Hugh Kenner was one of his students. McLuhan also taught at Fordham University one year (1967-68), when his son Eric McLuhan did the famed Fordham Experiment.

Student life

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), McLuhan evidently worked concurrently on two ambitious projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (grammar, dialectic and logic, and rhetoric – collectively known as the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key turn that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a reemphasis on the importance of rhetoric and language over the formal study of logic. This shift signaled in Renaissance humanism was largely a shift in emphasis, not a shift to totally eliminate one verbal art. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature – an approach McLuhan felt was exemplified at times by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis. (For a nuanced account of McLuhan's thought regarding Richards and Leavis, see McLuhan's "Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson" in the Sewanee Review, volume 52, number 2 (1944): 266-76.)

Because both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion, it is not surprising that McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous contemporary examples of persuasion in popular culture. From centering his attention on persuasion in his doctoral dissertation and in his book, he made a dramatic inward turn, as it may be styled, in attending to the inwardness of persuasion carried out by communication media as such, as distinct from their content. His famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) slogan "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) uses hyperbole to call attention to the inward impact of communication media. However, it should be noted that he titled his later (1967) book The Medium is the Massage.

We can use Lonergan's terminology from Insight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message": At the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.

When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. McLuhan's inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the impact of communication media sets him apart from more outward oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.

Theoretical framework

The Mechanical Bride (1951)

McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a pioneering study in the field known today as popular culture. It is sui generis, as is his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which McLuhan carries forward his use of short essays that can be read in any order – an approach that he styles a mosaic approach to writing a book.

Advertising as an environment

McLuhan's interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the short book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson (1933).

According to McLuhan, a student at the University of Toronto told him that Harold Innis had put The Mechanical Bride on the reading list for one of his courses there, which led McLuhan to discover Innis's later work.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study of print culture, a pioneering study in cultural studies, and a pioneering study in media ecology.

Throughout the book, McLuhan is at pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

...*f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. (Gutenberg Galaxy 1962, p. 41)

Movable type

His episodic and often rambling history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

In this passage not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [... The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. (Galaxy pp. 124-26)

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: Print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification" (Galaxy p. 154).

The global village

Visual, individualistic print culture will soon — McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s — be brought to an end by what McLuhan calls "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [... In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. (Galaxy p. 32)

Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects: If we are not vigilant to the effects of media's impact, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent — it is a tool that shapes profoundly an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? * Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality. (Galaxy p. 158)

Technology affects cognition, and the moral valence of these changes is, for McLuhan, good or bad, depending on one's perspective. In the later seventeenth century, for instance, McLuhan identifies a considerable amount of alarm and revulsion towards the growing quantity of printed books. A few hundred years later, though, many thinkers express alarm at the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan is a popularizer or the coiner of the term "surfing" when used to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's excellent 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution.

McLuhan frequently quotes Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write this book. Once again, Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747. However, in the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia, Ong subsequently qualified his earlier praise by characterizing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond" (8: 838). McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of Gutenberg Galaxy. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media 1960 NAEB report that I'm doing now."

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won the 1963 Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, Canada's highest literary award. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto, and oftentimes intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye. W. Terrence Gordon, p. 109

Understanding Media (1964)

The medium is the message

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is also a pioneering study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study – popularly quoted as "the medium is the message" — it should be noted that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had developed such a theory in "The industrial production of cultural commodities" in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). McLuhan's theory is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan posits that a light bulb is the most clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs. McLuhan posits that a light bulb has no content, yet it creates space; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. McLuhan states that a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. (UM page 8) More controversially, he postulates that content had little effect on society – in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example – the effect of television on society would be identical. He notes that all media have characteristics that engaged the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but (at least until the advent of the videocassette) a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

Hot and cold media

McLuhan also claims in the first part of "Understanding Media", that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasts this with TV, which he claims requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value. (UM page 22)

In Understanding Media, McLuhan generally divides media into hot (high definition of information) and cool (low definition of information). A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition means the state of being well-filled with data. A cool medium is one with low definition. Because of the lack of information, much has to be filled in by users. Therefore, a cool medium generally requires higher level of participation of users than a hot medium. When looking at the two different kinds of media, it can be interpreted that the hotter the medium, the less someone needs to interpret what is being presented to them, whereas the colder the medium, the more someone has to uncover and engage in the media. For example, this could be compared with hot a high definition photograph where the viewer can glean a lot of information contrasted with a blue print where the viewer has to 'fill in the blanks'.

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

Less enduring than McLuhan's better known aphorism, "the medium is the message," is "the medium is the massage." Nonetheless, in 1967, McLuhan would adopt the latter as the title of a book written with Quentin Fiore, begun during McLuhan's tenure at Fordham University in New York City as Albert Schweizer Chair in Humanities. According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, "by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue; the subtitle is "An Inventory of Effects," underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying."W. Terrence Gordon, p. 175 In this book, McLuhan adopts the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, inventorying the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.

Near the beginning of the book, McLuhan adopts a pattern in which an image is presented, and on the next page the choice of image is explained by a synopsis of each media effect, followed by a new image and the facing page, with another explanation and so on. The shifting of analytic registers, from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles, reinforces McLuhan's overarching argument in this book, namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

Media as "extension"

In "'The Medium is the Massage,'" McLuhan rehearses the argument, which first appears in the Prologue to 1962's "'The Gutenberg Galaxy'", that media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.

Technological and artistic developments in history

Changing from this pattern into a more conversational style, McLuhan presents key changing points in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth *", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "The technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television. (pg 69)

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

McLuhan uses James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration towards the study of war throughout history as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.

Ten Thunders
Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram that reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man as revealed through Ten Thunders. Each thunder below is a 100 character portmanteau of other words to create a statement the likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in the Wake represent different stages in the history of man (pg 46):

Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic.
Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.

Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry.
Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.

Thunder 3: Specialism.
Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.

Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens.
Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.

Thunder 5: Printing.
Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.

Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution.
Extreme development of print process and individualism.

Thunder 7: Tribal man again.
Both all choractors end of separate, private man. Return of choric.

Thunder 8: Movies.
Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.

Thunder 9: Car and Plane.
Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.

Thunder 10: Television.
Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. Last thunder = turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

The Medium is the Massage (audio recording, late 1960's)

An audio recording version of McLuhan's most famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960's incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."

"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art" - 'Old man' speaking
"Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey" - 'Middle aged man' speaking

Other concepts

Figure and ground

McLuhan's statement that the content of any medium is another medium leads the concept of a figure and a ground. Here McLuhan claims that when a new medium is created, it will eventually overtake those media from which its content is derived as an innovation. The older medium becomes a ground upon which the new medium stands as a more noticed figure.

Tetrads

A tetrad is a means of examining the effects of a medium on society by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. Visually, a tetrad consists of five diamonds forming an X, with the name of media listed in its centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Reversal and Obsolescence qualities, both Ground qualities.

Enhancement (figure): The amplification of practical solutions to known problems.

Retrieval (figure): The recovery of old values. Transition of ground to figure.

Reversal (ground): Unexpected and new problems when a medium is amplified too much.

Obsolescence (ground): The erosion of contemporary values. Transition from figure to ground.

McLuhan's influence

McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, William Irwin Thompson, and Douglas Rushkoff.

McLuhan in popular culture

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity had much to do with the work of two Californians, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal profits to fund their practice of "genius scouting." Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines, in May of 1965, at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both Time and Newsweek, anytime he was in need. In August of 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival," McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, editors from the San Francisco Chronicle and Rampart's magazine. Perhaps more significant, however, was Tom Wolfe's presence at the festival, which he would later write about in his article, "What If He Is Right?," published in New York Magazine and Wolfe's own The Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, however, their work had only a moderate impact on McLuhan's eventual celebrity. Feigen and Gossage later claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of * genius by about six months."P. Marchand, pp. 182-184

Nonetheless, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse from then on. For example, Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him. He made a cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall. Alvy Singer (Allen's character) presents McLuhan to rebuff the professor behind Alvy, who is trying to impress his date with his discussion of Marshall McLuhan's work. He corrects the professor and derisively asks how he ever became a professor. Woody captured an important aspect of McLuhan's personality – having him utter the line "You know nothing of my work, and how you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." According to some of his biographers, McLuhan was fond of telling his students and others that they simply did not understand him, no matter how much of his work they had studied.P. Marchand, p. 117 Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with McLuhan.

He is mentioned in the song Broadway Melody of 1974 by progressive rock band Genesis, featured on their 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The lyrics read: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand." During the late 1990s, the Canadian rock band 5140 initially titled their sixth release for EMI Records Canada "Marshall McLuhan, Casual Viewin," but were forced to change it due to copyright infringement.

In 1983 he was lampooned in the David Cronenberg film Videodrome, where his character was given the name "Professor Brian O'Blivion" and issued such memorable quotes as "The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye" and "I refuse to appear on television, except on television".

McLuhan in modern technology culture

McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of Wired Magazine, and a quote from McLuhan appeared on the masthead of the magazine for the first ten years of its publication. Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a Wired Magazine mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for Wired Magazine that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."* Timothy Leary credited a meeting with McLuhan with inspiring him to create the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out." McLuhan's ideas have informed much of Silicon Valley culture, and have inspired intellectuals including Jaron Lanier. McLuhan himself met with many academics, including Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson.

In 1970, McLuhan was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. After McLuhan's death, his former student and friend Walter J. Ong wrote what is arguably the most favorable assessment of McLuhan in print anywhere to this day: "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past," Journal of Communication 31 (1981): 129-35.

As mentioned above, Oxford University Press published the 550-page Letters of Marshall McLuhan in 1987. Two biographies of McLuhan have been published – one by Philip Marchand in 1989 and the other by W. Terrence Gordon in 1997. Books and articles in which McLuhan's thought is discussed are far too numerous to enumerate here.

Further information about McLuhan's thought can be found in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1st ed. 1994: 481-83; 2nd ed. 2005: 643-45), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (U of Toronto P, 1993: 421-23), and Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999: 744-47).

Recognizing his lasting global influence for his pioneering work on the study of media ecology, the government of Canada honoured him with his image on a postage stamp in 2000.

In 2004, the University of Chicago Press noted that Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong today "enjoy the status of honorary guru* among technophiles" (see the back cover of Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason that was reissued by the University of Chicago Press in 2004, with a new foreword by Adrian Johns).

On March 27-28, 1998, Fordham University sponsored a symposium on the Legacy of McLuhan, who had taught at Fordham for one year. In 2005, Hampton Press published papers from the symposium as the book The Legacy of McLuhan, edited by Lance Strate.

Quotations

"Concepts are a provisional affair." (1951)

"The perfection of the means of communication has given * average power complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression." (1953)

"With the return to simultaneity we enter the tribal and acoustic world once more. Globally." (1956)

"Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties." (1962)

"Any technology tends to create a new human environment... Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." (1962)

"A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters." (1964)

"Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice." (1964)

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin." (1964)

"Money is the poor man's credit card." (1964).

"There are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in space. It's now." (1965)

"Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." (1967)

“The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.” (1969)

"The American bureaucracy ... was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense." (1970)

"The artist is the only person; his antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present." (1970)

"What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software." (1971)

"Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job is a passe entity. The job belonged to the specialist. The kids know that they no longer live in a specialist world; you cannot have a goal today. You cannot say, "I'm going to start here and I'm going to work for the next three years and I'm going to go all that distance." Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed including himself and the goal." (1971)

"Electrically speaking, there's nothing but nuzzling and cuddling and cooing, alternating with wild yells for love and food and help. It's always May Day in the global nursery." (1974)

"At the moment of Sputnik, the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors." (1974)

"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence." (1976)

" ... as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear." (1980)

See also

Works

Published Interviews

"Understanding Canada and Sundry Other Matters: Marshall McLuhan." Mademoiselle, January 1967, pp. 114-115, 126-130. "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Playboy, March 1969, pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63.

"The Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan." by Peter C. Newman. Maclean's, June 1971, pp. 42, 45.

"An Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women." by Linda Sandler. Miss Chatelaine, September 3, 1974, pp. 58-59, 82-87, 90-91.

"It Will Probably End the Motor Car: An Interview With Marshall McLuhan." by Kirwan Cox and S. M. Crean. Cinema Canada, August 1976, pp. 26-29.

"Interview With Professor Marshall McLuhan." Maclean's, March 7, 1977.

Biographical works

  • Carpenter, Edmund. "That Not-So-Silent Sea" B. In The Virtual *Marshall McLuhan. By Donald F. Theall. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001: 236-61. (For the complete essay before it was edited for publication, see the external link below.)
  • Daniel, Jeff. "McLuhan's Two Messengers: Maurice McNamee and Walter Ong: world-class interpreters of his ideas." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Sunday, August 10, 1997: 4C).
  • Flahiff, F. T. Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson. *Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2005.
  • Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. Basic Books, 1997.
  • Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. Routledge, 1999.
  • Marchand, Philip. Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium and the Messenger. The MIT Press; Revised edition (May 1, 1998).
  • Molinaro, Matie; Corinne McLuhan; and William Toye, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Ong, Walter J. "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past." Journal of Communication 31 (1981): 129-35. Reprinted in Ong's Faith and Contexts: Volume One (Scholars Press, 1992: 11-18).
  • Ong, Walter J. review of McLuhan's The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962. Criticism 12 (1970): 244-51. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002: 69-77).
  • Theall, Donald F. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.

External links

End Notes

1911 births | 1980 deaths | 20th century philosophers | Canadian expatriate academics in the United States | Canadian literary critics | Canadian philosophers | Companions of the Order of Canada | Edmontonians | Literary critics of English | Media theorists | New Criticism | North American cultural studies | Philosophers of technology | Postmodernism | Rhetoric | Rhetoricians | Roman Catholic Canadians | Saint Louis University faculty | University of Manitoba alumni | Winnipeggers

Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan | מרשל מקלוהן | Marshall McLuhan | マーシャル・マクルーハン | Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan | Маклюэн, Маршалл | Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan | Marshall McLuhan

 

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