Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton on 21. of July 1911. His father sold life insurance and mother was an elocutionist who gave dramatic monologues in theaters and churches. From his mother he inherited the talents of memorization and speech. He also preferred talking to writing as a form of communication. He went to school in Winnipeg where the family moved few years after his birth and continued his studies in the University of Manitoba until he got an M.A. in English literature in 1934. When he was a 20-year old student he wrote in his diary that he would never become an academic. “He was learning in spite of his professors, but he would become a professor of English in spite of himself.” (http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/gordon.html)

After Manitoba he started studying in the University of Cambridge and spent two years acquiring a B.A. He studied under I. A. Richards, who was a psychologist turned literary critic. Richards examined the process of reading and for him “- - it was not the paraphrasable content of a poem that mattered but the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader.” (http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/marchand.html) Later McLuhan used the same technique for studying media and was inspired by another Cambridge professor, F. R. Leavis. Leavis told his students to analyze their cultural surroundings, cultural environment in the same way they analyze literature. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, McLuhan’s first book published in 1951, was an exercise in cultural criticism, a series of essays on advertisements, laying bare their cultural roots and assumptions.

In 1936 McLuhan left Cambridge to teach at the University of Wisconsin. He stayed there for a year and then, following his conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis. He married Corinne Keller Lewis, a Texas drama student with whom he had six children. He returned to Canada in 1944 where he taught two years at what was then known as Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. Finally he settled at the University of Toronto which became his home for the rest of his career. Here he met Harold Innis, a political economist who had discovered that certain media of communication are time based and certain media—more portable and ephemeral—are space based. Working with this, and discovering simultaneously in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake, a critique of radio and television, McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user.

In 1964 McLuhan published his best known book called Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man(Abstract). It focuses on the media effects that permeate society and culture, but McLuhan’s starting point is always the individual, because he defines media as technological extensions of the body. As a result, McLuhan often puts his inquiry and his conclusions in terms of the ratio between the physical senses (the extent to which we depend on them relative to each other) and the consequences of modifications to that ratio. This invariably entails a psychological dimension. Thus, the invention of the alphabet and the resulting intensification of the visual sense in the communication process gave sight priority over hearing, but the effect was so powerful that it went beyond communication through language to reshape literate society’s conception and use of space.

"McLuhan wrote with no knowledge of galvanic skin response technology, terminal node controllers, or the Apple Newton. He might not have been able even to imagine what a biomouse is. But he pointed the way to understanding all of these, not in themselves, but in their relation to each other, to older technologies, and above all in relation to ourselves—our bodies, our physical senses, our psychic balance. He was disturbed about mankind’s shuffling toward the twenty-first century in the shackles of nineteenth century perceptions. He might be no less disturbed today. And he would continue to issue the challenge that confronts the reader at every page of his writings to cast off those shackles."(http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/gordon.html)

Marshall McLuhan got numerous honorary degrees and awards before he died in Toronto, 31 December, 1980. More information about McLuhan’s books and books related to them you will find in the article Bibliography of Marshall McLuhan and Combatant.

Sources:

Herbert Marshall McLuhan. (2004, December 9.). Retrieved 14:09, March 5, 2009, from http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/cv.html

Marshall McLuhan. (2009, March 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:08, March 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marshall_McLuhan&oldid=274224044

Marshall McLuhan. (2004, December 9.). Retrieved 14:10, March 5, 2009, from http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/gordon.html

Marshall McLuhan. (2004, December 9.). Retrieved 14:11, March 5, 2009, from http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/marchand.html

Contributor: Lauri Heikonen for "Pedagogical Media Theory"