McLuhan, Marshall (1911–1980)

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian academic, author, speaker, and consultant whose controversial pronouncements on the connections between media and culture revolutionized media studies and initiated a worldwide conversation on the impacts of media that persists to this day. McLuhan considered as a medium any technology, technique, or artifact that changes the pace, volume, or pattern of human interactions. Thus, clothing, housing, clocks, money, airplanes, and automobiles can be considered media as much as communication media per se.

His most influential work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, landed on the cultural scene in 1964 like a meteorite, exploding across the media landscape and igniting fiery debates. The incendiary nature of this work was deliberate. It was written in an aphoristic, probing style consciously chosen to ...