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Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, academic, professor of English literature, communications theorist and one of the founders of modern media studies.

Recognizing his lasting global influence for his pioneering work on the study of media the government of Canada honoured him with his image on a postage stamp in 2000. (above right)

Having captured the public imagination with the publication of his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with designer Quentin Fiore), Random House, 1967, McLuhan became a pop culture figure in the mass media of the 1960s. These works also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.

As a student at Cambridge University in England he employed the techniques of the new criticism developed in part by his teacher there I.A. Richards. The new criticism paid close attention to the words on the page, instead of historical or symbolic analysis. Later he used a "mosaic" approach where no single point of view would dominate the interpretation. He studied artefacts of popular culture to reach his own students in the teaching of English literature. This attention to popular culture, advertising, observation of everyday life and the mosaic approach proved to be influential in what he would later refer to as "probes".

He became famous for aphorisms like "The medium is the message" (he later published a book whose title was a play on this phrase The medium is the massage) and "the global village" a phrase that has been atrributed to Wyndham Lewis. One of his own seminal influences. One of these aphoristic probes appears as a McLuhan quotation on the autodidacticism (self-education) page of wikipedia. He became one of the early purveyors of the sound bite.

McLuhan once stated that he considered all of his work to be a "footnote" to the work of Harold Innis. Harold Innis was one of the preeminent Canadian scholars of his day and a reknown economist. He was also a student of George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago. McLuhan and Innis met in the late 1940s, but did not collaborate seriously, as Innis died in 1952.

Innis influenced the development of ideas on the nature and significance of communications media to culture. Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication demonstrate the genesis and evolution of his ideas. "Innis's theory of communication divided media into two "biases"; time-binding media and space-binding media. Time-binding media such as manuscripts and oral communication have limited distribution potential. According to Carey (1992), time-binding media "favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority" (p. 134). Space-binding media such as print and electronic media are concerned with expansion and control."

Both McLuhan and Innis are considered by some, along with classicist Eric Havelock to be the founding pillars of the "Toronto School of Communication". Others linked to this "school" include anthropologist Edmund (Ted) Carpenter, and Harley Parker.

With respect to media McLuhan asserted that each different medium is an extension of the senses that affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot"; media which engage one's senses in a high-intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film.

Classifying other media as "cool"; media of lower resolution or intensity, that require more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television. While many of his pronouncements and theories have been considered impenetrable, and by some absurd, or unfalsifiable in scientific terms. McLuhan's central message; that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media remains ever more true in the electronic age. As does it's underlying purpose; "the training of perception".

What made McLuhan a "media guru" to sixties pop culture mavens in the mass media "TV age", also made him "the patron saint" of the "electronaissance" to a new generation in the extended era of electronic media known as secondary orality. This term was coined in a monograph by Walter J. Ong who was a graduate student of his. Secondary orality is characterized by the presence, growth and spread of media , new media, multimedia, and digital communications networks.

In Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, he allegedly coined the term "software", but the Oxford English Dictionary traces usage of the word back to 1960. The Gutenberg Galaxy, written in 1962 is his study of the psychological and cognitive effects of standardised printing. The title of the same book was the origin of the term " Gutenberg Galaxy". Other usages of words attributed to McLuhan that have made their way into popular culture include 'iconic" and "feedback".

In 1946 McLuhan became a professor of English literature at the Catholic St. Michael's College, within the public University of Toronto system. This was a very productive period in his life. Through lectures he gave and especially his fabled Monday night seminars he continued to speak and teach and write in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Culture and Technology that he helped established there until his passing in 1980.

As his fame spread and as an example of just how sought after and influential his opinions became, he served as special envoy for education to the Vatican. He also advised the US government on a media education curriculum. The latter commission resulting in the first draft for Understanding Media. At once impenetrable and at the same time his classic text. During his tenure there many other luminaries of the 1960's visited McLuhan at the centre including the Beatles and then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

He appears as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall. This role immortalized McLuhan in the film medium. He comes to his own defense when he proclaims to another professor that he "knows nothing of his work". It is as much a testament to his fame and stature as a sixties popular culture icon as it is a measure of how much controversy his ideas stirred up. His demise at the dawn of the electronic revolution was untimely.

After his death along with other prominent public personalities Allen successfully petitioned the University of Toronto to support a continuation of his pioneering studies on media and their effects that began at the centre.

Because the U of T , McLuhan's legacy and the centre, now a program that he founded there and now bears his name are forever linked, the University of Toronto never felt the need to offer graduate studies in media studies, communications or culture and technology.

A newly constituted centre known as the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology is the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. The McLuhan Program is currently under the direction of Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove. De Kerkchove was McLuhan's student, translator and later took over from literacy scholar David Olson as the director.

Wired magazine named McLuhan its patron saint when the magazine launched in 1993. In fact "Wired style" in it's earliest incarnations was almost identical to the style of design introduced by McLuhan and Fiore in The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan's work is sometimes equated with that of a futurist. This may be due to the wide scope of his ideas and his stature as a one of the greatest visionaries of all time. Similarly today by association many view the internet and cyberspace as a prophetic embodiment of his ideas.

The author Tom Wolfe a leading exponent of the new journalism once posed the question "What if he is what he appears to be: The most important thinker since Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and Freud." What would the implications be? Today because of his pioneering techniques McLuhan can be related to Einstein or Freud via such disparate fields as quantum mechanics and the realm of the infinitesimally small. Much is going on there that isn't visible to the human eye or that the conscious mind can be made aware of. And so it is with the medium and the message. We cannot always see the message because it is embedded in the social context ie. the medium.

His idea of a medium and his methodology were as foreign to the twentieth century,as was Darwin's to 19th Century England. Darwin reversed figure and ground (McLuhan borrowed these terms from Gestalt psychology) in human affairs permanently by bringing the mechanisms of nature's creative codes to the forefront of our awareness and opening them to investigation. No less dramatic McLuhan's project was to examine and treat all human artifacts as extensions or media and show how they created effects.

McLuhan observed media and believed that communications media evolve and when juxtaposed produce what he called in Understanding Media hybrid or creative energy. This creative-evolutive pathway leads to the analysis of particular media and the interrelationship of their processes at odds with their environment. Why they are at odds with their environment is that same competition that Darwin observed. Competition in this organic interprocess of time, space, energy, and material that make life and creativity itself a possibility.

In Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte describes the quantum dimension as characteristic of the coming technological era of nanotechnology. Which is already in the process of displacing both visual or literate visual space which according to McLuhan was invented by the Romans who enclosed the arch inside a rectangle and the current extended era of secondary orality, electric media and language that is a result of the invention of electricity.

McLuhan espoused the idea of the Global Village, to express the view that the effects of extending the human nervous system outside the human body re-embodied self in the form of a global communication network, thereby creating proximity in effect, despite geographic distance.Thus apparently reversing the effects that would be predicted by classical Newtonian physics.

Wolfe also implied that in a similar fashion there was a relationship between McLuhan's concepts and those of Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin drew from religion and science for his ideas. A poetic technique that was driven out of western science during the enlightenment partly due to it's unpredictable results. It was also practiced by Leonardo da Vinci. A perfect example of how the medium is only as good as the message. According to de Chardin, the concept of the noosphere was the outermost of a succession of layers of evolution emanating from the core of the earth. De Chardin, a paleontologist, a geologist and a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest exemplifies a version of an interdisciplinary approach that does bear some similarity to the methodology that McLuhan also pioneered.

Similarly in the history of western technology and thought Galileo was imprisoned for his truths. De Chardin's works remained unpublished until after his lifetime. So too McLuhan was ridiculed and branded a "McLunatic" and a "holy fool" for his ideas. Thus perpetuating this knowledge gap that now has become the digital divide and contributing to the dangerous arguement that the truth itself is a highly subjective western invention tied closely to the invention of visual space.

There is a common point of confusion for McLuhan's audience. It is his use of the term 'message', as in "The medium is the message". There are two messages: the overt content (such as the story told in a television program), and the hidden message of change to our sensory abilities, ways of thinking, society, and political structure caused by the mass activity of watching television. Every new medium changes the mix and exerts its effects on us and our society. An important goal of McLuhan's work was to make us aware of these changes, to give us control over what was happening to us by virtue of this awareness.

Beyond a poetic sensibility and an interdisciplinary method of investigation McLuhan's religious values also played a heavy role in the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas as they did in de Chardin's work. McLuhan who was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to Elsie and Herbert McLuhan and raised in a Baptist, Scotch-Irish family would later convert to Roman Catholicism and remain a devout Catholic as reflected by his life and career.

On page 103 of The Medium and the Light in this regard he said "In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same."

McLuhan also cited electric light as an example of a medium with no content, only message. The message in this case was the profound change brought by being unharnessed from the rhythm of day and night, the ability to have a round-the-clock society.

One way or another "The medium is the message" is at the core of his thesis. Aside from spiritual enlightenment he also felt that an understanding of media could also become part of a trend toward a new emerging discipline that would come to be known as media ecology.

McLuhan stated that visual space came to dominate in western culture before electricity and electric media with the advent of alpahbetic technologies popularized by the Greeks. In fact for McLuhan all western civilization begins and ends with the Greeks and with the phonetic alphabet. The hidden ground of civilization.

After the Greeks adopted the technology of the alphabet, there was a long period of tension between oral and literate modes of communication. For centuries, the ancient oral tradition persisted alongside the practice of writing. McLuhan pointed out that there was a very rich cultural result from the interplay of the oral and written forms. The revival of oral culture in our own electronic age now exists in a similar fecund relation with the still powerful written and visual culture. We are in our century "winding the tape backwards." The Greeks went from oral to written even as we are moving from written to oral. They ended in a desert of classified data even as we could "end" in a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.

According to McLuhan, the story of the ancient Greeks is our own story, unfolding in reverse. It is a tale with particular relevance for educators at the end of the 20th century, which also happens to be a time of revolutionary innovation in communications technology.

Although often rejected or suppressed in western culture when first proposed, radical theories like evolution or media and messages for that matter have been very successful at explaining some of life's mysteries. But not without controversy. Darwin for example refused to publish his theories for many years knowing all too well what fate would meet him if he presented the truth. A knowledge gap emerged that needed to be filled. What McLuhan referred to as a resonating interval and break boundary.

McLuhan argued that there were a succession of media that evolved in the development of western culture that came to predominate. Beginning with the phonetic alphabet, writing and manuscripts then print and books followed by electric media like the telegraph and then later radio, phones, the television and the internet. Each one forming the content of it's successor.

A related phenomena is the disappearance of written text as the dominant mode of communication and expression of thought in Western society. This is being replaced by the uncontrollable and pervasive influence of nearly contentless, light-speed, acoustic, media technology such as television and the internet which is itself also a text based electronic medium.

Text as we know it now has a subservient or radically altered use in our heavily mediated and divided world. Some would say it has been obsolesced altogether, or that text itself in the west at least is dead. A greater understanding of textuality and it's role in relation to the western concept of literacy may hold the key to understanding this problem and help with finding a solution.

Literacy and the Mind: The Contexts and Cognitive Consequences of Literacy Practice.is an examination of the effects of literacy on cognition and the acquisition and use of knowledge sponsored by UNESCO. The author modifies one of the core tenets of the Toronto School of Communication, and maintains that schooling, as opposed to literacy itself, is primarily responsible for many of the cognitive changes attributed to mass literacy in the post-Gutenberg era.

The study found that there was no evidence of direct effects of literacy on thinking, and differences between the formal and non-formal literates were such that they pointed to schooling rather than literacy effects. Different cognitive approaches to thinking skills are evident in communities with relatively high degrees of literacy integration, but only when applied to community activities and practices.

When literate activities are carried out, not everyone who takes part in the activity has to be literate. It is not literacy acquisition itself that affects thought, but rather the degree to which literacy is integrated into the life of a community. That is, the effects are mediated by the individual's participation in the literate activities of the community. The effects of literacy seem to arise as a result of being a participant in the community activities (the global village)that incorporate literacy skills.

The results of this study actually support McLuhan's basic notion: The medium is the message. In this specific instance, it is the integration of literacy into the community environment, and the nature of the ensuing effects (messages) that reveals the nature and characteristics of literacy (as a medium) itself.

This is also supported by linguistics where text enters at least two types of contrasts. One is that between system and text, system being understood as the ability of the speakers to communicate using verbal signs, and text being understood as the product of this ability. The other is between text, understood as written text, and speech, spoken text.

Through journals he kept during the early part of his academic life he intimated his intention to codify a set of universal or general laws or principles at some point in his career. This was done perhaps as an indicator of the scope of his ambitions.

Until the relatively recent posthumous publication of Laws of Media in 1988 his methodology remained controversial and poorly understood by many as did his theories on media.

The fullfilment of his ambitions is best exemplified by Laws of Media which first appeared as an article by McLuhan in 1975 and formed the basis of his last decade of collaborations with many including Barrington Nevitt (with whom he has co-authored Take Today: The Executive as Drop Out. Laws of Media as a book was completed by McLuhan's son Eric, and published a decade after his death.

After a decade-long search, Eric and Marshall McLuhan discovered that there are four such messages or characteristics that they posed as probes: What does the artefact extend, enhance, accelerate or enable? When extended beyond the limit of its potential, into what does it reverse? What does it obsolesce or cause to lose its dominance? What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced? Given that these can apply to all conceptions and creations of humankind, all human artefacts be they tangible or intangible are media. Using the four media laws allows us to find connections and ratios or analogues among things and ideas that are not obviously connected, thereby assisting us in becoming aware of the hidden ground.

McLuhan called this four fold set of laws and figure ground relationship a "tetrad". Some posit a fifth law based on McLuhans statement that much of his work is mennipean satire. Today's audience would recognize this technique at it's present coordinates at adbusters.com on the internet and represented in phenomena such as culture jamming. Below right is a graphical representation of a tetrad.

The roots of McLuhan's interpretation, and the laws of media, are deeply rooted in the past. They are traceable to the ancient Western curriculum, the trivium (logic, rhetoric, and grammar) a tradition which McLuhan re-discovered while preparing his doctoral thesis at Cambridge. In the Laws of Media, he linked these own discoveries to the work of Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico.

Today McLuhan is universally acknowledged as a major philosophical founder of the discipline of media ecology, a term McLuhan himself used. Successors to McLuhan in this field, or those arguably influenced by him are numerous. Neil Postman who learned from McLuhan institutionalized media ecology as an academic discipline. In his book The Disappearance of Childhood Postman put forth the thesis that childhood as an institution of the print medium has dissappeared from western culture.

Another is Derrick de Kerckhove who is the author of The Skin of Culture and more recently Connected Intelligence. Another important successor is Eric McLuhan, who is the author of Electric Language. Paul Levinson who was also a friend of McLuhan's is the author of Digital McLuhan. Jean Baudrillard a post-modern educator and philosopher perhaps best known for his theories of hyperreality, and simulacra is sometimes referred to in the popular sense as "the European McLuhan.". Another European scholar who used the term ecology in relation to media as early as the 1960's is Jacques Ellul.

Another of the many collaborations of note that McLuhan undertook was with Tony Schwartz. Schwartz, a "creative genius and masterful teacher" worked in advertising and pioneered study of the soundscape. He has written two books on media and communication The Responsive Chord and Media: The Second God.

McLuhan's wide intellectual influence extends to other branches of thought and learning such as cultural studies and communication studies as well as media studies. McLuhan's work is linked to other philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century such as postmodernism especially through its precursor deconstuction and Derrida and the disciplines of linguistics and semiotics through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and with the study of mass media.

"According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms of modernism is the distinction between speech (logos) and writing, with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos. As part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text, Derrida showed that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that subsumes both speech and writing. Deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what an author says about her text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others.

In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion. Communication is possible not because the text has a transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the author contains similar "markings" or signs as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary."

Universities are learning how to respond to the knowledge explosion that now spans whole generations not years.Under print regimes these institutions produced 1-2% of new knowledge per year. Competing in the new electronic environment that doubles new knowledge every few years Universities are imploding. Implementation of media curriculums could be seen as a part of a critical strategy to keep western forms of knowledge relevant.And to avoid the kind of knowledge obsolescence McLuhan was concerned about by returning language humankinds first mass media technology and the word it's most basic unit to it's original state as both a creative and an evolving media.

For many the relevance of McLuhan's ideas will always be associated with the study of mass media and with the tumult of the 1960's. A time in which for many figure and ground changed places permanently too. However if the conservatism of the 1950's led to the catalyst for change that was the 60's, the 1970's were a time of implementation of those changes. Then that in turn led to the upheavals and movement of people all over the world in the 1980's, and the period of global consolidation that was the 1990's. If we weren't before, shouldn't we be paying attention to him now? What if he is what he appears to be? What if he is right? What if the medium is the message?.

His whole life was a search for the truth. Marshall McLuhan passed away on New Years Eve December 31, 1980 of a cerebral stroke which had rendered him speechless during the last year of his life. The inscription on his headstone reads "The Truth Shall Set You Free" and is taken from the Gospel of John in the New Testament. A street in Toronto near the McLuhan Program's Coach House location was designated "Marshall McLuhan Way" in the summer of 2004, part of Toronto's new McLuhan Festival of the Future.

• 1951 The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard Press)
• 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press)
• 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill)

• UbuWeb Marshall McLuhan featuring the LP The Medium is the Massage
• Official Site
• Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message (CBC Archives)
• McLuhan global research network Jeffrey's McLuhan bibliography free online
• Terry Mockler's Journey Through Cyberspace