Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan
...an introduction to the man
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Who was Marshall McLuhan?

• Marshall H. McLuhan (1911-1980)
• Born in Edmonton, Alberta
• Educated in Cambridge, England (Literature)
• Lectured at the University of Toronto
• Wrote many influential books and publications
• - The Gutenberg Galaxy The Making of
  Typographic Man 1962
• - Understanding Media The Extensions of
  Man.1964
• - The Medium is the Massage 1967
• War and Peace in the Global Village 1968
• Considered by many as a pop philosopher
• Provocative, quirky, controversial, cynical.
• .ahead of his time?

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McLuhanisms...
Money is the poor man's credit card. (1964)
I don't necessarily agree with everything I
say. Art is anything you can get away
with. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth
century. Anyone who tries to make a
distinction between education and entertainment
doesn't know the first thing about
either There are no passengers on spaceship
earth. We are all crew.
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McLuhanisms...
 The future masters of technology will have to
be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine
easily masters the grim and the dumb.
(1969)   We become what we behold. We shape our
tools and then our tools shape us   A moral
point of view too often serves as a substitute
for understanding in technological matters.
(1964) Television brought the brutality of war
into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was
lost in the living rooms of America - not on the
battlefields of Vietnam.
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McLuhanisms...
At the moment of Sputnik, the planet became a
global theater in which there are no spectators
but only actors. (1974)   There are no remote
places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is
remote in time or in space. It's now. (1965)
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) 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)
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Consider one of the following....
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the medium is the message "electronic
independence re-creates the world in the image of
a global village" 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)
We become what we behold. We shape our tools
and then our tools shape us
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M Level

• Consider one of McLuhans famous quotes on the
  previous slide and then in your own words write a
  ½-1 page interpretation on what they mean?