Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.
Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation 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.
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.
Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced.
The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.
I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.
Electronic man has no physical body.