Marshall McLuhan

Who was Marshall McLuhan?

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.

Famous Quotes:

• The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
• The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
• We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
• The medium is the message.
• The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
• It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
• Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.
• Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
• American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
• Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.