Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar. A professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, McLuhan is revered as one of the founders of the study of media ecology.

Perhaps the most celebrated English teacher of the twentieth century, McLuhan was a fixture in media discourse from the late 1960s to his death and remains highly influential. Timothy Leary credited a meeting with McLuhan with inspiring his phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out." The "patron saint" of Wired magazine, McLuhan famously coined the expression, "the medium is the message."

Born Herbert Marshall McLuhan, in Edmonton, Alberta, to Herbert and Elsie (née Hall). The McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba while Marshall was still a young child. While in Winnipeg, McLuhan would earn a BA and MA in English, after a one year stint as an engineering major, at the University of Manitoba. (A prominent hall at the University of Manitoba was recently named in his honour.) McLuhan later enrolled at the University of Cambridge. There, he would study under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and was influenced by New Criticism. Upon later reflection, he credited the faculty there for being chiefly concerned with the training of perception. This application finds resonance throughout his work, as do occasionally such notions of Richards' from the 1930s as feedforward.

During the 1936-37 academic year, McLuhan taught as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. On 30 March, 1937, McLuhan culminated what was a slow but total conversion process when he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church. Subsequently, he taught in Roman Catholic institutions of higher education. From 1937 to 1944 he taught English at Saint Louis University. There he taught and befriended Walter J. Ong (1912-2003), who would go on to do his Ph.D. dissertation on a topic McLuhan had called to his attention, and who would himself also later become a well-known authority on communication and technology. On 4 August, 1939, McLuhan married Corinne Lewis of Fort Worth, Texas, and they spent 1939-40 at Cambridge University, where he continued to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. From 1944 to 1946 McLuhan taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.

From 1946 to 1979 he taught at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, where Hugh Kenner was one of his students. McLuhan also taught at Fordham University as the Albert Schweizer Chair in Humanities for one year (1967-68), during which time his son Eric McLuhan did the famed Fordham Experiment.

During his years at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), McLuhan evidently worked concurrently on two ambitious projects: his doctoral dissertation and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as the book The Mechanical Bride, which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts (grammar, dialectic and logic, and rhetoric -- collectively known as the trivium) from the time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe.^[1] In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture. McLuhan suggests that the Middle Ages, for instance, was characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and language. Modern life is characterized by the reemergence of grammar as its most salient feature -- a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis.^[2]

In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous slogan, "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic impact of communications media.^[3] The slogan, "the medium is the message," is best understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.^[4]

When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. McLuhan's inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the impact of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others.

McLuhan also started the journal, Explorations, with Edmund "Ted" Carpenter.^[5]

McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a pioneering study in the field known today as popular culture. It is sui generis, as is his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which McLuhan carries forward his use of short essays that can be read in any order – an approach that he styles a mosaic approach to writing a book.

Mechanical Bride is comprised of newspaper and magazine articles and advertisments which are each acompanied by an analysis of the article it corresponds to. The analyses dissect each article or ad on its aesthetics as well as the implications behind the imagery and text.

McLuhan stresses several times throughout Mechanical Bride that the essence of it is not only to call attention to the ads and articles in order to draw attention to the symobolism and their implications in regards to the corporate entities that put the pieces out originally, but in what this reflects in a society where such advertising prevails.

McLuhan's interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the short book Culture and Environment by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson (1933).

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (written in 1961, first published in Canada by University of Toronto Press in 1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.

Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.^[6]

His episodic and often rambling history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.)

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins, McLuhan remarks:

In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.^[7]

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."^[8]

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.^[9]

Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to the effects of media's impact, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent -- it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.^[10]

The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's excellent 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution.

McLuhan frequently quoted Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write this book. Once again, Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America.^[11] However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."^[12] McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now." {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1963. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.^[13]

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is also a pioneering study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study –- popularly quoted as "the medium is the message." McLuhan's theory was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the lighbulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."^[14] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society –- in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example -– the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

McLuhan also claimed in the first part of Understanding Media, that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.^[15]

In this book, initiated by Quentin Fiore, McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, inventorying the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.^[16] Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these theories. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers -- from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles -- reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan also rehashed the argument -- which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy -- that media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.

Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]," brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.^[17]

McLuhan used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration for the study of war throughout history as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.

Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100 character portmanteau of other words to create a statement the likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man:^[18]

1. Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic.
   • Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
2. Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry.
   • Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
3. Thunder 3: Specialism.
   • Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
4. Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens.
   • Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
5. Thunder 5: Printing.
   • Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
6. Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution.
   • Extreme development of print process and individualism.
7. Thunder 7: Tribal man again.
   • Both all choractors end of separate, private man. Return of choric.
8. Thunder 8: Movies.
   • Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
9. Thunder 9: Car and Plane.
   • Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.#
10. Thunder 10: Television.
    • Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. Last thunder = turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

An audio recording version of McLuhan's most famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960's incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."

"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art." - 'Old man' speaking

"Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey." - 'Middle aged man' speaking

McLuhan's statement that the content of any medium is another medium leads the concept of a figure and a ground. Here McLuhan claims that when a new medium is created, it will eventually overtake those media from which its content is derived as an innovation. The older medium becomes a ground upon which the new medium stands as a more noticed figure.

A tetrad is a means of examining the effects of a medium on society by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as five diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual tv.

McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance Strate, and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity had much to do with the work of two Californians, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal profits to fund their practice of "genius scouting." Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May of 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reported that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both Time and Newsweek, any time he needed it. In August of 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival," McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, editors from the San Francisco Chronicle and Rampart's magazine. Perhaps more significant, however, was Tom Wolfe's presence at the festival, which he would later write about in his article, "What If He Is Right?," published in New York Magazine and Wolfe's own The Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, however, their work had only a moderate impact on McLuhan's eventual celebrity. Feigen and Gossage later claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of [McLuhan's] genius by about six months."^[19]

In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him. Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with him. He made a cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, in which Alvy Singer (Allen's character) presented McLuhan to show up another professor who was trying to impress his date by discussing McLuhan's work. McLuhan corrected the professor and scornfully declared, "You know nothing of my work, and how you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." Woody captured an important aspect of McLuhan's personality in this line; according to some of his biographers, McLuhan was fond of telling his students and others that they simply did not understand him, no matter how much of his work they had studied.^[20]

He is mentioned in the song Broadway Melody of 1974 by progressive rock band Genesis, featured on their 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The lyrics read: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand." During the late 1990s, the Canadian rock band 54-40 initially titled their sixth release for EMI Records Canada "Marshall McLuhan, Casual Viewin," but were forced to change it due to copyright infringement.

In 1983, he was lampooned in the David Cronenberg film Videodrome. McLuhan's character, "Professor Brian O'Blivion," issued such memorable quotes as: "the television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye", "I refuse to appear on television, except on television" and "television is reality and reality is less than television."

McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of Wired Magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication. Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a Wired mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for Wired that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."^[21] Timothy Leary credited a meeting with McLuhan with inspiring him to create the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out." McLuhan's ideas have informed much of Silicon Valley culture, and have inspired intellectuals including Jaron Lanier. McLuhan himself met with many academics, including Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson.

In 1970, McLuhan was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. After McLuhan's death, his former student and friend Walter J. Ong wrote what is arguably the most favorable assessment of McLuhan in print anywhere to this day: "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past."^[22]

In 1987, Oxford University Press published the 550-page Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Two biographies have been published -- one by Philip Marchand in 1989 and the other by W. Terrence Gordon in 1997. Books and articles in which McLuhan's thought is discussed are far too numerous to list.

Further information about McLuhan's thought can be found in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1st ed. 1994: 481-83; 2nd ed. 2005: 643-45), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (U of Toronto P, 1993: 421-23), and Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999: 744-47).

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

In 2004, the University of Chicago Press noted that Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong today "enjoy the status of honorary guru[s] among technophiles."^[23]

On March 27-28, 1998, Fordham University sponsored a symposium on the Legacy of McLuhan, who had taught at Fordham for one year in the 1960s. In 2005, Hampton Press published papers from the symposium as the book The Legacy of McLuhan, edited by Lance Strate.

"Concepts are a provisional affair." (1951)

"The perfection of the means of communication has given [the] average power complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression." (1953)

"With the return to simultaneity we enter the tribal and acoustic world once more. Globally." (1956)

"Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties." (1962)

"Any technology tends to create a new human environment... Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." (1962)

"A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters." (1964)

"Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice." (1964)

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin." (1964)

"Money is the poor man's credit card." (1964).

"There are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in space. It's now." (1965)

"Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." (1967)

“The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.” (1969)

"The American bureaucracy ... was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense." (1970)

"The artist is the only person; his antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present." (1970)

"What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software." (1971)

"Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job is a passe entity. The job belonged to the specialist. The kids know that they no longer live in a specialist world; you cannot have a goal today. You cannot say, "I'm going to start here and I'm going to work for the next three years and I'm going to go all that distance." Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed including himself and the goal." (1971)

"Electrically speaking, there's nothing but nuzzling and cuddling and cooing, alternating with wild yells for love and food and help. It's always May Day in the global nursery." (1974)

"At the moment of Sputnik, the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors." (1974)

"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence." (1976)

" ... as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear." (1980)

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us" (????)

• List of notable brain tumor patients
• Infosphere

1. 1951 The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1st Ed.: The Vanguard Press, NY 1951) (Gingko Press) ISBN 1-58423-050-9
2. 1960 Report on Project in Understanding New Media National Association of Educational Broadcasters.
3. 1960 Explorations in Communication, edited with Edmund Carpenter. (1st Ed: Beacon Press: Boston 1960)
4. 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul) ISBN 0-7100-1818-5
5. 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Gingko Press)ISBN 1-58423-073-8
6. 1967 The Medium is the Massage (written with Quentin Fiore; produced by Jerome Agel) (Random House; 2000 reprint by Gingko) ISBN 1-58423-070-3
7. 1967 Verbo-Voco-Visual Explorations (1st Ed: Something Else Press, NY 1967)
8. 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village (design/layout by Quentin Fiore; produced by Jerome Agel) (2001 reprint by Gingko) ISBN 1-58423-074-6
9. 1968 Through the Vanishing Point - space in poetry and painting (written with Harley Parker) (1st Ed.: Harper & Row, NY 1968)
10. 1969 Counterblast (design/layout by Harley Parker) (1st Ed.: McClelland and Steward, Toronto 1969)
11. 1970 Culture is Our Business (1st Ed.: McGraw Hill, NY 1970)
12. 1970 From Cliché to Archetype With Wilfred Watson (1st Ed: Viking, NY 1970)
13. 1970 Take Today: the Executive As Dropout With Barrington Nevitt. (1st Ed: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY 1970)
14. 1977 City As Classroom: Understanding Language and Media With Eric McLuhan (1st Ed: University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1977)
15. 1988 Laws of Media: The New Science With Eric McLuhan (1st Ed: University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1988)
16. 1989 The Global Village with Bruce R. Powers) (Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-505444-X
17. 2004 Understanding Me (edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines),The MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-13442-X
18. 2006 The Classical Trivium. Corte Madera: Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-067-3.

1. "Understanding Canada and Sundry Other Matters: Marshall McLuhan." Mademoiselle, January 1967, pp. 114-115, 126-130.
2. "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Playboy, March 1969, pp. 26-27, 45, 55-56, 61, 63.
3. "The Table Talk of Marshall McLuhan." by Peter C. Newman. Maclean's, June 1971, pp. 42, 45.
4. "An Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women." by Linda Sandler. Miss Chatelaine, September 3, 1974, pp. 58-59, 82-87, 90-91.
5. "It Will Probably End the Motor Car: An Interview With Marshall McLuhan." by Kirwan Cox and S. M. Crean. Cinema Canada, August 1976, pp. 26-29.
6. "Interview With Professor Marshall McLuhan." Maclean's, March 7, 1977.

1. Carpenter, Edmund. "That Not-So-Silent Sea" [Appendix B]. In The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. By Donald F. Theall. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001: 236-61. (For the complete essay before it was edited for publication, see the external link below.)
2. Daniel, Jeff. "McLuhan's Two Messengers: Maurice McNamee and Walter Ong: world-class interpreters of his ideas." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Sunday, August 10, 1997: 4C).
3. Flahiff, F. T. Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson. *Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2005.
4. Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. Basic Books, 1997.
5. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. Routledge, 1999.
6. Marchand, Philip. Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium and the Messenger. The MIT Press; Revised edition (May 1, 1998).
7. Molinaro, Matie; Corinne McLuhan; and William Toye, eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987.
8. Ong, Walter J. "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past." Journal of Communication 31 (1981): 129-35. Reprinted in Ong's Faith and Contexts: Volume One (Scholars Press, 1992: 11-18).
9. Ong, Walter J. [Untitled review of McLuhan's The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962]. Criticism 12 (1970): 244-51. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002: 69-77).
10. Theall, Donald F. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.

1. McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
2. Useful introduction to some of McLuhan's ideas by Jim Andrews
3. Marshall McLuhan page from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
4. That Not-So-Silent Sea essay by Edmund Carpenter [PDF]
5. UbuWeb Marshall McLuhan featuring the LP The Medium is the Massage
6. Official Site
7. CBC Digital Archives - Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message
8. McLuhan global research network Jeffrey's McLuhan bibliography free online
9. McLuhan Revisited by Cecil Adams
10. The Media Ecology Association
11. Playboy Interview with McLuhan
12. Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club Venice, Calif. Very active West Coast USA club & link to Yahoo McLuhan group
13. Blog about Mcluhan's Tetrad , and media law
14. Digital Mcluhan book from Paul Levinson his scholar
15. Mcluhan Tetrad Concept explained