The Medium is the Message

Jul 21, 2011

July 21, 2011, marks the 100^th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. Such milestone occasions often give rise to special celebrations and McLuhan’s anniversary is no exception.

Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through most of the 1960s, his groundbreaking work (The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media), is essential to understanding media and how it affects the way we think. (Fellow University of Toronto scholar Harold Innis actually pioneered the study of mass media, although he did not attain McLuhan’s celebrity.)

Often credited with, among other things, foreseeing the Internet 30 years before its invention, McLuhan's work nevertheless began to fall out of favour in the years before his death in 1980 and was at times severely criticized.

Marshall McLuhan was always a polarizing figure. As author Norman Mailer once observed, McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.”

There has been an ongoing debate about the effects of a digital world, from Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil versus Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus to The Shallows of Nicholas Carr.

Now fully living in the age of the Internet, with new forms of communication such as Facebook and Twitter rivaling traditional print and broadcast, Marshall McLuhan’s centennial year provides the opportunity to renew our media perspective.