McLuhan, Marshall

1911–1980

Media Theorist

Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan remains one of the most influential new media theorists. He evaluated the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society with rich, detailed studies of the history of communication, skillfully reduced to evocative turns of phrase that are still embedded in the popular imagination. He believed that new media could be socially debilitating if used improperly. However, he did not want humankind to be bound by new media, but to be freed by it, and through his investigations, McLuhan sought to chart a course of social development that would avoid the risks of oppressive technologies.

Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 21, 1911. His interest in literature took him from the University of Manitoba to Cambridge University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1943. A devout Catholic, he was happy to take a post at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in 1944, and he remained based there for most of his career. McLuhan was made a full professor in 1952, a year after publishing his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Subsequently, he headed up some of the first large projects in communication studies. Between 1953 and 1955, he was chairman of the Ford Foundation Seminar on Culture and Communication, and between 1959 and 1960 was the director of the Understanding New-Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. At the University of Toronto, he helped found the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963, mandated to study the psychic and social consequences of media technologies, and he remained its director until shortly before his death in 1980.

McLuhan's Catholicism and his studies of contemporary literature, especially James Joyce, would help him assemble rich metaphors and referents for his cultural criticism. From the end of the Great Depression to the close of World War II, he taught in the United States, and later wrote that his initial teaching experiences at the Universities of Wisconsin and St. Louis introduced him to a cultural and media environment that he did not always understand. Along with Harold Innis and other scholars, McLuhan developed ideas that became known as the Toronto School of medium theory.