McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message"[13] (in the first chapter of hisUnderstanding Media: The Extensions of Man)[14], as well as the termglobal village. He predicted theWorld Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented.[15] He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.[16] In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.[17] However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.[18][19][20]
McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, inEdmonton, Alberta, and was named "Marshall" from his maternal grandmother's surname. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. His parents were both also born in Canada: his mother, Elsie Naomi (née Hall), was aBaptist school teacher who later became an actress; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was aMethodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton. When the business failed at the start ofWorld War I, McLuhan's father enlisted in theCanadian Army. After a year of service, he contractedinfluenza and remained in Canada, away from the front lines. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved toWinnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attendingKelvin Technical School before enrolling in theUniversity of Manitoba in 1928.[21]
After studying for one year as an engineering student in Winnipeg, McLuhan changed majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1933), winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences.[22] He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree (1934) in English from the University of Manitoba as well. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted byTrinity Hall, Cambridge, having failed to secure aRhodes Scholarship to study atOxford.[23]
Though having already earned his BA and MA in Manitoba, Cambridge required him to enroll as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's credit towards a three-yearbachelor's degree, before entering anydoctoral studies.[a][25] He went up toCambridge in the autumn of 1934, studied underI. A. Richards andF. R. Leavis, and was influenced byNew Criticism.[23] Years afterward, upon reflection, he credited the faculty there with influencing the direction of his later work because of their emphasis on the "training of perception", as well as such concepts as Richards' notion of "feedforward".[26] These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms.[27] He received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936[28] and entered their graduate program.
At the University of Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty,"[29] later referring to this stage as agnosticism.[30] While studying thetrivium at Cambridge, he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion toCatholicism in 1937,[31] founded on his reading ofG. K. Chesterton.[32] In 1935, he wrote to his mother:[33]
Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of religious faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery.
At the end of March 1937,[b] McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, when he was formally received into theCatholic Church. After consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable.[34] McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter.[35] In his personal correspondence and private writings, he sometimes made connections between his religion and the media: for example, he comparedsatellite technology to theStar of Bethlehem.[36] He had a lifelong interest in the number three[37] (e.g., the trivium, theTrinity) and sometimes said that theVirgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him.[c]
Unable to find a suitable job in Canada, he went to the United States to take a job as a teaching assistant at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison for the 1936–37 academic year.[39] From 1937 to 1944, he taught English atSaint Louis University (with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he returned to Cambridge). There he taught courses onShakespeare,[40] eventually tutoring and befriendingWalter J. Ong, who would write his doctoral dissertation on a topic that McLuhan had called to his attention, as well as become a well-known authority on communication and technology.[41][42]
McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St. Louis,[43] a teacher and aspiring actress fromFort Worth, Texas, whom he married on August 4, 1939. They spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940)[28] and began to work on his doctoral dissertation onThomas Nashe and the verbal arts. While the McLuhans were in England,World War II had erupted in Europe. For this reason, he obtained permission to complete and submit his dissertation from the United States, without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defence. In 1940, the McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University, where they started a family as he continued teaching. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943.[44]
He next taught atAssumption College inWindsor, Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, then moved toToronto in 1946 where he joined the faculty ofSt. Michael's College, a Catholic college of theUniversity of Toronto, whereHugh Kenner would be one of his students. Canadian economist and communications scholarHarold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on his work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own bookThe Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."[45] Tom Cooper'sWisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan explores the relationship of Innis and McLuhan in depth.[46]
From 1967 to 1968, McLuhan was named theAlbert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities atFordham University in the Bronx.[d] While at Fordham, he was diagnosed with abenignbrain tumor, which was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived inWychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking thedowntown whereAnatol Rapoport was his neighbour.[citation needed]
In 1970, he was made a Companion of theOrder of Canada.[48] In 1975, theUniversity of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair.[49] Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children:Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, includingIBM andAT&T.[27]
In September 1979, McLuhan suffered a stroke which affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research center shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests. McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980.[50] He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery inThornhill, Ontario, Canada.[51]
During his years at Saint Louis University (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoraldissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as a book, titledThe Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.
McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (grammar,logic, andrhetoric—collectively known as thetrivium) from the time ofCicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe.[e] In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of thetrivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history ofWestern culture. McLuhan suggests that theLate Middle Ages, for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to theRenaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts, but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and grammar.Modern life is characterized by the re-emergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by theNew Criticism of Richards and Leavis.[f]
McLuhan also began theacademic journalExplorations withanthropologistEdmund "Ted" Carpenter. In a letter to Walter Ong, dated 31 May 1953, McLuhan reports that he had received a two-yeargrant of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal.[52]
In 1999,Tom Wolfe suggested that a major under-acknowledged influence on McLuhan's work is theJesuit philosopherPierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the "noosphere."[53][54] In his early bookThe Gutenberg Galaxy, however, McLuhan warns against whole-heartedly accepting or outright dismissing Teilhard's observations.
This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin [sic] calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in 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 super-imposed co-existence.[55]
In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: "I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies." Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: "The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction ... is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word 'evolution'.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community."[56]
Some of McLuhan's main ideas were influenced or prefigured by anthropologists likeEdward Sapir andClaude Lévi-Strauss, arguably with a more complex historical and psychological analysis.[57] The idea of the retribalization of Western society by the far-reaching techniques of communication, the view on the function of the artist in society, and the characterization of means of transportation, like the railroad and the airplane, as means of communication, are prefigured in Sapir's 1933 article onCommunication in theEncyclopaedia of the Social Sciences,[58] while the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media draws from Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies.[59][60]
McLuhan's first book,The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. In the book, McLuhan turns his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as bothdialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed atpersuasion. At this point, his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence ofcommunication media independent of their content. His famousaphorism "the medium is the message" (elaborated in hisUnderstanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media.[g]
His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 bookCulture and Environment byF. R. Leavis andDenys Thompson, and the titleThe Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by theDadaist artistMarcel Duchamp.
The Mechanical Bride is composed of 59 short essays[62] that may be read in any order—what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article, or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear onaesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to theirsymbolism, as well as their implications for thecorporate entities who created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. Roland Barthes's 1957 essayMythologies, echoes McLuhan'sMechanical Bride, as a series of exhibits of popular mass culture (like advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs) that are analyzed in asemiological way.[63][64]
[I]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.
McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic,tribal humankind to theelectronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention ofmovable 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 meansphonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet fromlogographic or logogramic writing systems, such asEgyptian hieroglyphs orideograms.)
Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when theGutenberg press was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word fromWilliam Ivins'Prints and Visual Communication, McLuhan remarks:[68]
In this passage [Ivins] 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.
The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon inThe Medium Is the Massage) is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affectssocial organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visualhomogenizing of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance 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, andnationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visualquantification."[69][verification needed]
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronicinterdependence" wherein electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation to acollective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is theglobal village.[h]
The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations inThe Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not makingvalue judgments:[55]
Instead of tending towards a vastAlexandrian 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.
Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has noper se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society'sself-conception andrealization:[71]
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 thatdetribalizes 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 thisvisual 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.
The moralvalence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for 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 thecausalities and effects inherent in our technologies".[72]
Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years afterThe Gutenberg Galaxy, and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:[73]
The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the termsurfing to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly asDescartes rode the mechanical wave."Paul Levinson's 1999 bookDigital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution.[15]
McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong'sRamus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to writeThe Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book inAmerica.[74] However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan'sThe 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."[75] McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [The 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 ofUnderstanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."[76]
McLuhan'sThe Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, theGovernor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner,Northrop Frye.[77]
McLuhan's best-known work,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a seminal study in media theory. Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally…but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."[78]
McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". His insight is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content it delivers, but by its own characteristics. McLuhan points to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, but it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces at night that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan writes, "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[79] More controversially, he postulates that content has little effect on society—for example, whether television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, its effect on society is identical.[80] He notes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book can be reread at will, but a movie must be screened again in its entirety to study any part of it.
In the first part ofUnderstanding Media, McLuhan writes that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Using terminology derived from French anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss's distinction between hot and cold societies,[59][60] McLuhan argues that acool medium requires increased involvement due to decreased description, while ahot medium is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in streaming content but does not consider the tool's effects is not allowing an "extension of ourselves".[81] A movie is thus said to be "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value:[82] "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."[83]
Some media, such as movies, arehot—that is, they enhance a single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image. Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement with considerablestimulus. In contrast, "cool" print may also occupyvisual space, usingvisual senses, but require focus and comprehension to immerse readers. Hot media creation favouranalytical precision,quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential,linear, and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media include film (especiallysilent films), radio, the lecture, and photography.
McLuhan contrastshot media withcool—specifically, television [of the 1960s i.e. small black-and-white screens], which he claims requires more effort from the 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 the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Cool media are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, in addition to television, cool media includeseminars and cartoons. McLuhan describes the termcool media as emerging from jazz and popular music used, in this context, to mean "detached".[84]
This appears to force media into binary categories, but McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than asdichotomous terms.[27]
Some theorists have attacked McLuhan's definition and treatment of the word "medium" for being too simplistic.Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan's medium conflates channels,codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.[85]
InMedia Manifestos,Régis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan's envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:[86]
The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of ahomo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on.
Furthermore, whenWired magazine interviewed him in 1995, Debray said he saw McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.… McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology."[87]
Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "aphoristic" prose style, which he believes leavesUnderstanding Media filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."[88]
The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory ... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism.… For if the medium—whether print or television—is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects.
David Carr wrote that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance of sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.[90]
While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities[91] and suitability for virtual space.[92]
The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller,[19] "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide."[93] Initiated byQuentin Fiore,[94] McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the humansensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.[i]
Fiore, at the time a prominentgraphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with atextual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading"typographic print to "scanning" photographicfacsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.
InThe Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962'sThe Gutenberg Galaxy—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.
Finally, McLuhan described key points of change 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 [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of thesuspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by thebard abilities of radio, movies and television.[96]
The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively inBonanza-land.[97]
An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made byColumbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhaninterrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in variousphonations andfalsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s 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."[98]
"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
Joyce'sWake is claimed to be a giganticcryptogram that reveals a cyclic pattern for human history through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-characterportmanteau of other words to create a statement McLuhan 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 (many of these 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 inWake represent different stages in the history of man:[99]
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. All characters end up 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 anddecentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
Collaborating withCanadian poetWilfred Watson[100] inFrom Cliché to Archetype (1970), McLuhan approaches the various implications of the verbalcliché and of thearchetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village: theglobal theater.
In McLuhan's terms, acliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects. McLuhan provides the example ofEugène Ionesco's playThe Bald Soprano, whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from anAssimil language book: "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible."[101]
McLuhan'sarchetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment."Environment would also include the kinds of "awareness" andcognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological contextCarl Jung described.
McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between thecliché and thearchetype, or a "doubleness":[102]
Another theme of the Wake [Finnegans Wake] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type ofhendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.
Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.
The "languages of the heart", or what McLuhan otherwise defined as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.
According to McLuhan, the satellite medium encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed."[104] All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the termglobal theater. This updates his concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition of the global theater.
McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview ofvisual space—a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model—and that ofacoustic space—aholistic, qualitative order with an intricate,paradoxicaltopology: "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere."[105] The transition fromvisual toacousticspace was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow"[106] inherently favorsright-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that theApollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the Moon.
McLuhan illustrates how it feels to exist within acoustic space by quoting from the autobiography ofJacques Lusseyran,And There Was Light.[107] Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:
When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So, there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name—hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were. From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different, but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from a different angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even theories but like whims.[108]
Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with theleft brain and visual space, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain and acoustic space are the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical."Comprehensive awareness" results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview ofEuclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is linearly rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory. McLuhan writes aboutrobotism in the context ofJapanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too related to the left brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake ofBlade Runner and the novels ofPhilip K. Dick. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes fromRuth Benedict'sThe Chrysanthemum and the Sword an anthropological study ofJapanese culture published in 1946:[109]
Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.
The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.
"All Western scientific models of communication are—like theShannon–Weaver model—linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality."[110] McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality.
A third term ofThe Global Village that McLuhan and Powers develop at length isThe Tetrad. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974.[111] The tetrad is an analogical, simultaneous, fourfold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other."[112] Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbiustopological structure of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network.
InLaws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his sonEric, McLuhan summarized his ideas aboutmedia in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:
What does the medium enhance?
What does the medium make obsolete?
What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats," or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.[27]
Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are theEnhancement andRetrieval qualities of the medium, bothFigure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are theObsolescence andReversal qualities, bothGround qualities.[113]
A blank tetrad diagram
Using the example of radio:
Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies.Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence.Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost.Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits.Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.
McLuhan adapted theGestalt psychology idea of afigure and a ground, which underpins the meaning of "the medium is the message." He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium, orfigure, necessarily operates through its context, orground.
McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals.[27]
All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions abouttime and space. The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used—and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates—are analysed together. He believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society.[27]
In McLuhan's (andHarley Parker's) work, electric media have an affinity withhaptic and hearing perception, while mechanical media have an affinity with visual perception. This opposition between optic and haptic had previously been formulated by art historiansAlois Riegl in his 1901Late Roman Art Industry, and byErwin Panofsky, in his 1927Perspective as Symbolic Form.
In hisThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935),Walter Benjamin observed how, in perceptions of modern Western culture, from about the 19th century a shift began from the optic toward the haptic.[114] This shift is one of the main recurring topics in McLuhan's work, which McLuhan attributes to the advent of the electronic era.
After the publication ofUnderstanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most-publicized 20th-century English teacher and arguably the most controversial.[according to whom?][115] This publicity began with the work of two California advertising executives,Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen, who used personal funds to fund their practice of "genius scouting".[116][117] Much enamoured of McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at theLombardy 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 bothTime andNewsweek anytime he wanted it.[116]
In August 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, and editors from theSan Francisco Chronicle andRamparts magazine. More significant was the presence at the festival ofTom Wolfe, who wrote about McLuhan in a subsequent article, "What If He Is Right?", published inNew York magazine and Wolfe's ownThe Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, their work had only a moderate effect on McLuhan's eventual celebrity: they claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of his genius by about six months."[118] In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse.Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared inLife,Harper's,Fortune,Esquire, and others. Cartoons about him appeared inThe New Yorker.[19] In 1969,Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with him.[119] In a running gag on the popular sketch comedyRowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the "poet"Henry Gibson would randomly say, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"[120]
McLuhan was credited with coining the phraseTurn on, tune in, drop out by its popularizer,Timothy Leary, in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview withNeil Strauss, Leary said the slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"[121]
Woody Allen's Oscar-winningAnnie Hall (1977) featured McLuhan in acameo as himself. In the film, a pompous academic is arguing with Allen in a cinema queue when McLuhan suddenly appears and silences him, saying, "You know nothing of my work."[125]
In 1991, McLuhan was named the "patron saint" ofWired magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead[citation needed] for the first ten years of its publication.[127]
Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan posted on aWired mailing list in 1996. The information this person provided convinced oneWired writer that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."[127]
A new centre known as theMcLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, formed soon after his death in 1980, was the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Since 1994, it was part of theUniversity of Toronto Faculty of Information. In 2008, the centre incorporated in the Coach House Institute, which was subsequently renamedThe McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. In 2011, at the time of his centenary, the centre established a "Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship" program in his honour. The centre closed in 2023. The Canadian Embassy in Manila awards a Marshall McLuhan Fellowship for "Excellence in Journalism ... that promotes professional, responsible and courageous media."
The media room atCanada House in Berlin is called theMarshall McLuhan Salon.[132] It includes a multimedia information centre and anauditorium, and hosts a permanent exhibition dedicated to McLuhan, based on its collection of film and audio items by and about him.[133]
In 2025, McLuhan's childhood home in Winnipeg was turned into a museum.[134]
^McLuhan later commented "One advantage we Westerners have is that we're under no illusion we've had an education. That's why I started at the bottom again."[24]
^Gordon 1997, p. 74, gives the date as March 25; Marchand (1990), p.44, gives it as March 30.
^Associates speculated about his intellectual connection to the Virgin Mary, one saying, "He had a direct connection with the Blessed Virgin Mary. ... He alluded to it very briefly once, almost fearfully, in a please-don't-laugh-at-me tone. He didn't say, 'I know this because the Blessed Virgin Mary told me,' but it was clear from what he said that one of the reasons he was so sure about certain things was that the Virgin had certified his understanding of them."[38]
^During the time at Fordham University, his sonEric McLuhan conducted what came to be known as theFordham Experiment about the different effects of "light-on" versus "light-through" media.
^McLuhan's doctoral dissertation from 1942 was published by Gingko Press in March 2006. Gingko Press also plans to publish the complete manuscript of items and essays that McLuhan prepared, only a selection of which were published in his book. With the publication of these two books a more complete picture of McLuhan's arguments and aims is likely to emerge.
^For a nuanced account of McLuhan's thought regarding Richards and Leavis, seeM. McLuhan 1944.
^The phrase "the medium is the message" may be better understood in light ofBernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level ofconsciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan's terminology fromInsight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message"; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found "much sense" in it—in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend,Walter J. Ong, McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan'sInsight".[61] Lonergan'sInsight is an extended guide to "making the inward turn": attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully. When McLuhan declares that he is more interested inpercepts thanconcepts, 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. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out byGeorge Herbert Mead,Erving Goffman,Berger andLuckmann,Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.
^SometimesWyndham Lewis'sAmerica and Cosmic Man (1948) andJames Joyce'sFinnegans Wake are credited as the source of the phrase, but neither used the words "global village" specifically as such. According to McLuhan's sonEric McLuhan, his father, aWake scholar and a close friend to Lewis, likely discussed the concept with Lewis during their association, but there is no evidence that he got the idea or the phrasing from either; generally, McLuhan is credited as having coined the term.[70]
^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.[95]
However, the FAQ section on the website maintained by McLuhan's estate says that this interpretation is incomplete and makes its own leap of logic as to why McLuhan left it as is:
Why is the title of the bookThe Medium Is the Massage and notThe Medium is the Message? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title was supposed to have readThe Medium is the Message, but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate:Message andMess Age,Massage andMass Age.
^Boxer, Sarah (April 3, 2003)."McLuhan's Messages, Echoing on Iraq". Critic's Notebook.The New York Times. p. 1.Archived from the original on January 31, 2023. RetrievedMarch 10, 2011.
^Farrell, Thomas J. (January 2023). "Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric McLuhan's Two Books on Menippean Satire".ETC: A Review of General Semantics.80 (1): 15, 18 – via EBSCO.
^McLuhan, Marshall. [1964] 2005.Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press. v. 8, p. 8.This is a reprint of McLuhan's introduction to the 1964 edition of Innis's bookThe Bias of Communication first published in 1951.
^Cooper, Tom. 2025. Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thoughts of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Brewster, MA :Connected Editions. pp. 10 ff.
^Wyatt, David (December 1971). "Hot and Cool in Anthropology: McLuhan and the Structuralists".The Journal of Popular Culture.5 (3):551–561.doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1971.0503_551.x.
^Giessen, H W (1995), „Remarks to Marshall McLuhan“. In: Communications. The European Journal of Communication. Vol. 20, No. 1, (April) 1995, 129–135.
^Giessen, H W (2015). "Media-Based Learning Methodology: Stories, Games, and Emotions". In Ally, Mohamed; Khan, Badrul H. (eds.). International Handbook of E-Learning Volume 2: Implementation and Case Studies. Routledge, 43-54.
^Daniele Luttazzi, interview atRAI Radio1 showStereonotteArchived 2007-06-29 at theWayback Machine, July 01 2007 2:00 am. Quote: "McLuhan era uno che al premier canadese che si interrogava su un modo per sedare dei disordini in Angola, McLuhan disse, negli anni 70, 'riempite la nazione di apparecchi televisivi'; ed è quello che venne fatto; e la rivoluzione in Angola cessò."(in Italian)
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Havers, Grant N. (2014). "Marshall McLuhan and the Machiavellian Use of Religious Violence". In Ricci, Gabriel R. (ed.).Faith, War, and Violence. Religion and Public Life. Vol. 39. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. pp. 179–203.ISBN978-1-4128-5499-3.ISSN1083-2270.
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