53 Facts About Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory.

Marshall McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge.

Marshall McLuhan began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Marshall McLuhan predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented.

Marshall McLuhan was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.

Marshall McLuhan's parents were both born in Canada: his mother, Elsie Naomi, was a Baptist school teacher who later became an actress; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a Methodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton.

Marshall McLuhan went on to receive a Master of Arts degree in English from the university as well.

Marshall McLuhan had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted by Trinity Hall, Cambridge, having failed to secure a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

Marshall McLuhan received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program.

At the University of Manitoba, Marshall McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty," later referring to this stage as agnosticism.

Marshall McLuhan opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely.

Marshall McLuhan taught me the reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery.

Marshall McLuhan's mother felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable.

Marshall McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained a private matter.

Marshall McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St Louis, a teacher and aspiring actress from Fort Worth, Texas, whom he married on August 4,1939.

Marshall McLuhan was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943.

Marshall McLuhan next taught at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, then moved to Toronto in 1946 where he joined the faculty of St Michael's College, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto, where Hugh Kenner would be one of his students.

From 1967 to 1968, Marshall McLuhan was named the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx.

Marshall McLuhan returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived in Wychwood Park, a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour.

Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric, twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael.

In September 1979, Marshall McLuhan suffered a stroke which affected his ability to speak.

Marshall McLuhan is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.

Marshall McLuhan suggests that the Late Middle Ages, for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic.

Marshall McLuhan began the academic journal Explorations with anthropologist Edmund "Ted" Carpenter.

Marshall McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture.

Marshall McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their symbolism, as well as their implications for the corporate entities who created and disseminated them, but to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but Marshall McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:.

Marshall McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, which evidently had prompted Marshall McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Marshall McLuhan's most widely-known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is a seminal study in media theory.

Marshall McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept.

Marshall McLuhan describes the light bulb as a medium without any content.

Marshall McLuhan noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that Marshall McLuhan's medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.

In Media Manifestos, Regis Debray takes issue with Marshall McLuhan's envisioning of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan's eclectic writing style has been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space.

Finally, Marshall McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media.

The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by Marshall McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought.

In Marshall McLuhan's terms, a cliche is a "normal" action, phrase, etc.

Marshall McLuhan posits that there is a factor of interplay between the cliche and the archetype, or a "doubleness:".

Marshall McLuhan relates the cliche-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd:.

Marshall McLuhan writes about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology.

Marshall McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974.

In Laws of Media, published posthumously by his son Eric, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects.

Marshall McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:.

Marshall McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats," or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

Marshall McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure and ground together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other.

Marshall McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them.

Marshall McLuhan believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society.

Marshall McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase Turn on, tune in, drop out by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s.

Douglas Coupland argued that Marshall McLuhan "was conservative, socially, but he never let politics enter his writing or his teaching".

In 1991, Marshall McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of Wired magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication.

Marshall McLuhan is jokingly referred to during an episode of The Sopranos entitled "House Arrest".

Marshall McLuhan is the subject of the 1993 play The Medium, the first major work from the influential Saratoga International Theater Institute and director Anne Bogart.