Mcluhan, Marshall

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) spent nearly all of his life in Canada. Born in Edmonton on July 21, he was raised in Winnipeg and developed an early interest in engineering. There, he earned an M.A. in English, then went to Cambridge University and received additional B.A. and M.A. degrees, and also a Ph.D. (English). A widely published author of more than thirty books, one of which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, McLuhan taught for three decades at the University of Toronto and died in Toronto on December 31.

McLuhan virtually invented the field of media studies and its relation to culture and society. McLuhan argued that the initial content of any new medium is always a preexisting medium (so radio, for example, takes over from the music hall and the newspaper; TV subsumes radio drama and film; and so on), so that the study of how a medium is used reveals little or nothing about its formal character or effects. Content study invariably leads to moral declaration and away from knowledge of the new form. Each major new medium means a new culture, and often a new war (McLuhan and Fiore 1968). For McLuhan the usual "moralistic" approach to media matters was incapable of producing real insight into the working of media as potent cultural forms.

His groundbreaking Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) was the first to examine the effects of technologies of communication on shaping the culture and sensibility of the users. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had observed, "The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses" (1870). This was a key to McLuhan's insight into human artifacts. McLuhan thus pioneered the study of the human senses as they are extended and modified by old and new media alike. The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) details the impact of the printing press on late-medieval European sensibility and how it brought about the Renaissance. Later works traced the effects of electric technologies, beginning with the telegraph, in dissolving print culture and literacy and instituting a new kind of tribal mentality that extends worldwide. Although he approached the study of media by observation and analysis, the major criticism leveled at his work was that it was "not scientific."

In posthumous works such as Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan; 1988) and The Global Village (with Bruce R. Powers; 1989), McLuhan synthesized his major discoveries and identified four scientific laws that govern the action of all human artifacts: amplification, obsolescence, reversal, and retrieval. He explored how his work integrated and updated the work of Francis Bacon (Novem Organum) and Giambattista Vico (The New Science).

McLuhan had a facility for aphorism, encapsulating a complex process in a memorable phrase such as "The medium is the message." He went to great lengths to point out that each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects that are its unique message.

The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium (McLuhan 1964, p. 8).

What he writes about the railroad applies with equal validity to the media of print, television, computers, and now the Internet. "The medium is the message" because it is the "medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action" (p. 9).

Another McLuhan term that has entered common usage is "the global village." In Understanding Media he wrote, "since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electromagnetic discovery. Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear" (pp. xii–xiii). The "global village," which many now see forming as a result of the Internet, was a side effect of the telegraph and of radio.

McLuhan's work absorbed influences from prior work on the social and cultural impact of communications technology by Harold Innis (1894–1952) and others in the arts. In integrating and extending such perspectives, McLuhan created a distinctive approach to media studies often erroneously described as emphasizing a kind of technological determinism with rhetorical excess. In reality, however, McLuhan was simply pointing out how certain technologies influence the world so that their users could learn to control them.

After a decline in reputation during his later years and soon after his death, McLuhan was rediscovered in the 1990s, and his insights into media found new application in interpreting twenty-first-century global communications developments. Among those who have taken up the study of technologies and culture, McLuhan offers one of the more comprehensive and consistent explanations for the welter of changes that accompany science and technology—changes that include new challenges for ethics and politics. Although some scholars continue to dismiss him as a maverick, he has been welcomed by pioneers in digital communicationssuch as those associated with Wired magazine (founded 1993). Moreover, philosopher and media theorist Paul Levinson (1997) has drawn connections between McLuhan and the evolutionary epistemologies of Karl Popper (1902–1994) and Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996), both of which have ethical dimensions.

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Carpenter, Edmund, and Marshall McLuhan, eds. (1960). Explorations in Communication: An Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gordon, W. Terrence. (1997). McLuhan for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing.

Levinson, Paul. (1997). The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. New York: Routledge.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1967). Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. New York: Something Else Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1995). Essential McLuhan, ed. Frank Zingrone and Eric McLuhan. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. (1972). Take Today: The Executive as Drop-Out. Don Mills, Ontario: Longman Canada.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. (1989). The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall, and David Carson. (2003). The Book of Probes, ed. Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Random House.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. (1968). War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations that Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Sanderson, George, and Frank Macdonald, eds. (1989). Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.

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