The Global Village
MARSHAL McLUHAN (1911 - 1980)
Tomorrow is our permanent address
Marshall McLuhan
Technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the
means by which people are re-invented
Marshall McLuhan
We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we walk backwards into
the future
Marshall McLuhan
Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (21 July 1911-31 December 1980) was a Canadian thinker, professor, and author whose breakthrough theories sprang from his conviction that electronic media themselves have an impact far greater than that of the material they communicate.
The visionary communications theorist predicted the effects of electr(on)ic media on modern culture as early as 1957. A maverick academic, brilliant conversationalist, and dazzling linguist who, not unlike Martin Heidegger, loved puns, aphorisms, and wordplay, McLuhan is rightfully regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers (despite the fact he is occasionally taken to task for endorsing technological determinism. Nothing could be further from the truth).
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The Global Village
Marshall McLuhan is a central figure in the teaching of media literacy. His understanding of how media worked and affected culture was so prophetic, we are only understanding some of his statements today. The media, McLuhan predicted, would shrink the world and the intellectual process. Considering the number of hours we watch television, play video games, purposelessly surf the internet and the social scars left by some of the content of these media, McLuhan's voice rings hauntingly in our new millenium culture where students carry cell phones and e-mail pictures to each other.
"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a cent ury of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulat ion of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media."
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