Mcluhan, Marshall (1911–1980)

Often considered to be the prophet of the electronic age, Herbert Marshall McLuhan devoted most of his [Page 923]career to understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture and how this, in turn, affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. McLuhan is perhaps best known for his assertion that the medium is the message—the theory that the vehicle for transmission of a communicative event shapes and influences its reception and, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects that are its unique message. His work in communication studies has been compared to that of Darwin and Freud for its universal significance.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, McLuhan was a professor of English literature, philosopher, literary critic, and communications theorist and one of the founders of the study of media ecology. He received bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees from the University of Manitoba and later studied at Cambridge University, where he received additional B.A. and M.A. degrees, as well as completing a dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts for his Ph.D. While at Cambridge, he studied under I. A. Richards, a psychologist turned literary critic, who proposed that the significance of a work of poetry was not to be found in the phrasing of its content but rather in the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader. In later years, McLuhan adapted this technique to his study of the linguistic and perceptual biases of mass media. His work was inspired by another Cambridge professor as well, F. R. Leavis, who urged his students to critically analyze advertisements in the same way they analyzed literature. After leaving Cambridge in 1936, McLuhan taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then, following his lengthy conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis. In 1939, he married Corinne Keller Lewis, with whom he had six children. In 1944 he returned to Canada, where he taught for 2 years at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, before finally settling at the University of Toronto, which would be his home for the rest of his career.

McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, put the critical skills honed from Leavis's tutelage to use in a series of essays on advertisements, exploring and analyzing their cultural roots and assumptions. In particular, The Mechanical Bride examined what he believed to be the power of advertising to manage public consciousness. The book dealt with the influence of print media on the male and female psyche, positing that the objective of advertising is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual. McLuhan's work explored the nature of this hegemony, critically analyzing the agents of control and the messages' desired effect. The purpose for McLuhan was not to vilify the advertising industry but rather to provide insight into how media function.

McLuhan emphasized that communication through different forms of media—print, machine, and electric—requires not only a comprehension of the message content, but the ability to interpret the contexts created by the various media forms as well. The electric media environment, for example (i.e., television), is overloaded with rapidly changing, decentralized information, which can only be ordered meaningfully through advanced pattern-recognition skills. In other words, various forms of media create mosaic patterns of meaning, and the receiver's perception of reality depends upon the structure of information. This theory, that media of higher and lower definition create different sensory effects, led to his famous division of media into hot and cool categories. High-definition (“hot”) media, such as print or radio, are full of information and allow for less sensory involvement on the part of the reader or listener than low-definition (“cool”) media, such as telephone or television, which are relatively lacking in information and require a higher sensory involvement of the user. The form our information takes, then, is fundamental to the way that knowledge is perceived and interpreted—the medium is the message.

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