McLuhan, Marshall

Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was a Canadian English and media professor who spent the majority of his career at the University of Toronto. He has been called the “oracle of the electric age” and the “high priest of popcult” for his groundbreaking studies of media as they interact with language and environments. He began as an English Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge and moved to the United States, teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Saint Louis University before heading back to his native Canada. During these early teaching years, McLuhan discovered that his students were less interested in English and poetry than they were in media products such as comics, advertisements, and radio programs. Using his skills in New Criticism, which he had learned from F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards, he began to analyze and teach media as new forms of literature.

McLuhan's work was cumulative and borrowed heavily from his predecessors. His 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy was a “footnote” to the insights of Harold Innis. His 1964 book Understanding Media offered a media poetics based on the template set by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their work, Understanding Poetry (1938, rev. 1950). McLuhan's other works relied heavily on his deep knowledge, acquired during his dissertation research on the trivium, of the classical rhetorical tradition. He referred to himself as a grammarian, an artist, and many things other than a scholar or an academic, seeing the latter as restricting labels, “wonderful buffers for preventing people from confronting any form of percept.” He was one of the first celebrity professors and perhaps the first media professor made famous by the media itself.

McLuhan is most famously known for two sound-bite phrases: “The medium is the message” and “the global village.” The former refers to the ways in which the formal qualities of a given communication shape the perception and understanding [Page 205]of that communication as much or more than the content itself. Thus, in the example of this medium (a SAGE Reference book), the inclusion of an entry on McLuhan within the medium of an encyclopedia conveys his importance far more than the content of this entry can. The medium (encyclopedia) is the message (that McLuhan is important). “The global village” refers to the idea that, with electronic media, all of the world can now know everything about everyone everywhere else, the way one can know the intimate details of people in one's small tribal village. Thus, “the global village” is used to refer to the fact that the world is getting perceptually smaller, which is quite different from the perception that it was getting larger during, for example, the age of exploration. This phrase is also connected to the phrase “Think globally, act locally,” which Jacques Ellul popularized, and to the contemporary term glocal, a conflation of global and local usually used to signify the excellence of locally grown produce.

Work on and about McLuhan has been in a resurgent mode with the birth of the Internet and with the help of the institutions, groups, and cultural events he inspired, such as the Media Ecology Program at New York University, established by Neil Postman in 1971; Wired magazine, which named McLuhan as its “patron saint” upon its founding in 1993; and the Media Ecology Association, founded in 1998 by five of Postman's former students. Media ecology, a phrase coined by McLuhan's son Eric in 1968, is the term most frequently associated with McLuhan's ideas, although other terms associated with his influence include media theory, media studies, information ecology, and digital ecosystems. In these and many other areas of media scholarship, McLuhan is considered a canonical figure, if not the canonical figure.

...