McLuhan was for a time one of the most cited authors in the field of study of mass communication, following the publication of his two main books, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Moreover, he was probably as well known outside the circle of academic media specialists as within it. After a fairly conventional career as a teacher of literature, he became a spinner of theory and publicist for his ideas about the consequences for culture and society of changes in communication technology—from writing to print and from print to electronic media. Although his assessment of television happened to be especially topical in the 1960s, he was also continuing a North American (perhaps especially Canadian) tradition of interest in technology, communication and the new. He owed much of his central thesis to a forerunner and colleague at the University of Toronto, the economic historian Harold J.Innis, who had traced the connection between changes in communication technology in the ancient and medieval world and changing forms of political and social power. Innis argued that each medium had a bias towards a certain kind of application, message and effect and thus, eventually, a bias towards a certain kind of society. A similar version of communication determinism was elaborated by McLuhan, with particular stress on the difference between the pictorial medium of television, which involves the spectator imaginatively and sensorily, and the medium of print, with its linear, sequential logic and its bias towards rationalism and individualism.
McLuhan’s dicta are often best remembered summarily by his own catch-phrase ‘the medium is the message’. He was a controversial figure and it is impossible in a few words to strike an adequate balance in assessing his work. On the positive side were a lively imagination; a striking and aphoristic turn of phrase; an ability to cross academic boundaries and synthesize his eclectic finds.
Furthermore, he seems to have exerted charm as a person and influence as a teacher. The principal entry on the debit side is that he lacked any discernible system of thought or adherence to an established tradition of research method, so that his many ideas are often both questionable and untestable. It is still not clear whether or not he made a valid or original contribution to any precise understanding of media, yet he did call attention to the need to do this, at a good moment and in a way which could not be ignored. In respect of his own message, the manner of delivery may well have been more significant than the content. However, the increasing attention now being paid to the globalization of communication has raised McLuhan’s stock, and he may also be seen as a precursor of post-modernist thinking about mass communication.
