Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (Edmonton, 1911 - Toronto, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher and professor of literature, and is regarded as one of the founders of media studies. His work anticipated many of the debates about the information society, and it gave the world phrases that are now common currency, such as "global village" and "the medium is the message."

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, he spent his childhood in Winnipeg, where he studied at the University of Manitoba. He then went to Cambridge, where he worked under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and absorbed the ideas of New Criticism. His doctoral thesis on the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe was accepted in 1943. Before reaching Cambridge he had gone through a long search for faith, which ended in 1937 with his conversion to Catholicism, a commitment he kept largely private for the rest of his life.

Between 1937 and 1944 he taught English at Saint Louis University, where he became friends with Walter J. Ong, who later became a respected authority on communication and technology. In 1946 he joined the University of Toronto, where he spent the rest of his career. Together with the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter he founded the journal Explorations, and in 1951 he published The Mechanical Bride, a study of advertising and its effects on culture. His breakthrough came in 1964 with Understanding Media, in which he argued that every technology extends some part of the human body or mind.

The core of his thought is that a medium is never a neutral channel. For McLuhan, the way we transmit information changes the scale and rhythm of social life and the way people perceive the world, so the effect of a medium matters more than the content it carries. To illustrate this, he sketched a history of communication in stages: a tribal culture built on the spoken word, a shift toward abstraction and visual, systematic thinking brought about by writing, and the further transformations produced by print and electricity. This led him to claim that television and electronic media were recreating a kind of global village, in which people share experiences almost at once.

His influence peaked in the late 1960s and faded during the following decade. After his death, and especially with the spread of the Internet, his work regained attention, and he is now seen as a forerunner of media studies and of reflection on digital technology.