Marshall McLuhan Biography and List of Works

Canadian academic and commentator on communications technology, who developed theories about the role of the electronic media in mass popular culture. He is best known for the studies institutionalised as the University of Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology, where he was director from 1963. McLuhan's works include UNDERSTANDING MEDIA (1964) and MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE (1967), in which he argued that the form of media has more significant effect on society and knowledge than the contents carried. McLuhan prophesied that printed books would become obsolete, killed off by television and other electronic information technology.

"The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."
(from The Medium is the Message)

Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alta. His father was a real-estate and insurance salesman and mother an actress. He was educated at the universities of Manitoba and Cambridge (UK). In 1937 he converted to Roman Catholicism and taught thereafter only in Catholic institutions, at St. Louis from 1937 to 1944, then at Assumption in Canada. McLuhan's doctoral dissertation, completed in 1942, dealt with the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). In 1939 Mr. McLuhan married Corinne Keller; they had six children.

From 1946 to 1977 McLuhan was a member of the department of English at St Michael's College of the University of Toronto. In 1953 McLuhan founded with the anthropologist Edmund S. Carpenter and with part of a Ford Foundation grant a magazine called Explorationism. Some of its essays were later published in EXPLORATIONS IN COMMUNICATION (1960). In 1959 he became the director of the Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of Education. During this project he collected material for Understanding Media. THE GUTENBERG GALAXY (1962) won McLuhan the prestigious Governor General's Award for critical prose, and was translated into several languages. In 1967 he was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham University. McLuhan suffered a stroke in 1979 and was forced to retire from teaching. He died in Toronto on December 31, 1980.

McLuhan rejected Marx's view of production as a primary determinant in social change and replace it with technological inventions. The most important aspect of media is the technical medium of communication. The medium, claimed McLuhan, is the message. The mass production of printed materials shaped the culture of Western Europe from 1500 to 1900. In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan stated that 'print is the technology of individualism.' Similarly electric modes of communication reshape civilization in the 20th century. "Electricity does not centralise, but decentralises." (from Understanding Media) McLuhan argued that technology is an extension of the human nervous system and that technological changes create new environments of sense and feeling altering gradually patterns of perception. The form of medium shapes its content. McLuhan used the categories "hot" and "cool" to separate different means or channels of communication. "Any hot medium allows of less participating than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." Cooler media exhibit lower levels of information intensity. Thus radio is a hot medium, as are books are comics; telephone is cool, and also television: "It rejects hot figures and hot issues and people from the hot press media. Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly." (from Understanding Media) However, cinema is hot - the activity of film viewing, isolation and passivity, has similarities to the book reading.

"It is relevant to consider, that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at the mosaic mesh of dots."
(from Understanding Media)

Print is an outmoded medium, too 'linear' in its approach to reality, while television and other visual media override time and distance instantaneously - making the world a 'global village'. The globe's citizens share a culture which has much in common with that of oral societies. The global village has swept aside the individualising culture of print production. . "Department sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed." (from Understanding Media) The mass media have created a world of instant awareness to which the categories of perspective space and sequential time were irrelevant and in which a sense of private identity was untenable.

"We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to a point where we could say 'We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week'."

McLuhan's first book about the media world, THE MECHANICAL BRIDE (1951), a book about advertising and manipulation, did not inspire much attention when it appeared. (The book contained a passing tribute to Fritz Leiber, whose 'The Girl with the Hungry Eyes' from 1949 was about exploitation of the female image of ad-men.) According to McLuhan, contemporary culture only offers the illusion of diversity. The commercialisation produces mass uniformity and has dehumanising effect on those caught in its web. However, a decade later McLuhan's concept of 'media landscape' became highly topical through the works of Pop artist and media critics, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924) and Rayner Banham (1922-1988). The advertising and communications industries paid McLuhan's ideas much attention - among others he lectured to the top executives of General Electric, I.B.M. and Bell Telephone. "Ads are news," he once said. "What is wrong with them is that they are always good news."

McLuhan's theories were widely discussed in the 1960s and 1970s, but now his work is little read and cited, although his aphoristic style produced many slogans widely adopted in common usage. McLuhan's basic ideas, emphasis upon process rather than product, form over content (''the medium is the message"), have not lost its importance, anticipated advances in deconstructivist criticism and avant-garde art. Among the postmodern philosophers Jean Baudrillad has developed the theories of McLuhan, sharing his view that the medium of communication is a central feature of media culture. Raymond Williams has noted in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) that McLuhan's technological determinism acts as an ideological justification of dominant social relations.

Science fiction works which have to some extent been influenced by McLuhan and the ideas about the media include John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Dean R. Kootz's The Fall of the Dream Machine (1969), Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, John T. Sladek's The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970), J.M. Clézio's Les Geants (1973; Giants) and Barry N. Malzberg's The Destruction of the Temple (1974).

For further reading: McLuhan: Hot and Cool, ed. by Gerald Emanuel Stearn (1967); McLuhan: Pro and Con, ed. by Raymond Rosenthal (1968); The Post-Industrial Prophets: Instrpretations of Technology (1971); The Medium is the Rearview Mirror by D.Theall (1971); The Critical Twilight by J. Fekete (1977); Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan by D. Czitrom (1982); Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand (1989); Understanding Media Cultures by Nick Stevenson (1995) - Slogans made popular by McLuhan: The medium is the message; Culture is our Business; 'hot' media, such as film or radio, that concentrated attention on a single sense, against 'cold' media lke television that according to McLuhan required more participation on the part of the consumer. - Trivia: McLuhan makes a special appearance in Woody Allen's Academy Awarded film Annie Hall (1977) - Allen playing Alvy, silences a self-impressed McLuhan expert who talks pretentious drivel in a movie line by pulling McLuhan out of a poster to tell the man, "You know nothing of my work!"

THE PLACE OF THOMAS NASHE IN THE LEARNING OF HIS TIME, (1942)