Marshall McLuhan foresaw a web of connected minds decades before the internet
A Canadian English professor who wrote about Thomas Nashe gave us the phrases the medium is the message and the global village. Marshall McLuhan was a celebrity in the late 1960s, faded in the 1970s, and was rediscovered once the World Wide Web he had seemingly anticipated about thirty years early arrived.
McLuhan was born in Edmonton on 21 July 1911 and grew up in Winnipeg after his father's property business collapsed at the start of the First World War. He began as an engineering student at the University of Manitoba, switched to arts, and took a BA and MA in English. Having missed a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1934, where I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis taught him to treat perception itself as something to be trained.
Reading G. K. Chesterton led him into the Catholic Church in 1937, a step his mother feared would harm his career. He taught at Saint Louis University, where he befriended the young Walter Ong, married Corinne Lewis in 1939, and finished a Cambridge doctorate on the history of grammar, logic and rhetoric. His thesis argued that the Renaissance turned less on rediscovered texts than on a shift of emphasis away from formal logic toward rhetoric and grammar.
In 1946 he moved to St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto and stayed there for life. The economist Harold Innis shaped his thinking so strongly that McLuhan called The Gutenberg Galaxy a footnote to Innis. The Mechanical Bride, his 1951 study of advertising, came first; with a Ford Foundation grant of $43,000 he and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter launched the journal Explorations. To stop rivals poaching him, Toronto created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963.
Understanding Media introduced his most famous slogan. Supporting six children pushed him into corporate consulting and speaking, for clients including IBM and AT&T, and he became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1970. A stroke in September 1979 damaged his speech; protests stopped the university from closing his centre, and he died in his sleep on 31 December 1980.
Source: Marshall McLuhan
