LYCEUM – NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

DAGUPAN CITY, PANGASINAN

Institute of Graduate and Professional Studies
DOCTORS OF PHILOSOPHY IN FILIPINO

Reporter: JOSEPHINE I. ROXAS

Subject: Philosophy of Language
Professor: DR. TITO ROCABERTE

BIOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY OF MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian professor of literature and culture, developed

a theory of media and human development claiming that "the medium is the message."
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 21, 1911. His father
was a real estate and insurance salesman, his mother an actress. McLuhan studied first
engineering and then literature at the University of Manitoba, earning his B.A. degree in 1933
and M.A. in 1934. He then continued his studies in medieval education and Renaissance
literature at Cambridge University, which granted him the M.A. degree in 1940 and the Ph.D. in
1942. After several years of teaching in American universities, McLuhan returned to Canada
and became a full professor at the University of Toronto in 1952

The Greatest Irritation

McLuhan thought of himself as a grammarian studying the linguistic and perceptual biases of
mass media. A deeply literate man of astonishingly wide reading, he gravitated intellectually to
the cutting edge of modern culture, where the "irritation," he said, was greatest. His contribution
to communications has been compared to the work of Darwin and Freud for its universal
significance. Still, he was misunderstood by many because of his revolutionary ideas and their
expression in an aphoristic prose style. He emphasized the connectedness of things and built
what he called "mosaic patterns" of meaning, rather than offering mere argument using one-
dimensional specialist logic.
McLuhan studied changes in perception created by electric media competing with print and
machine process, the old strategy of fragmenting reality into informational categories. With the
integrating, interdisciplinary force of electric process, information shifts its focus from specialist
emphasis on detail towards a need to interpret the contexts created by media forms. The
environment, overloaded with detailed information, can be ordered meaningfully, McLuhan said,
through enhanced pattern-recognition skills, the ability to deal with open systems undergoing
continual change at electric speed. He stressed how electric processes decentralized
information, bringing simultaneous awareness to every point in a network. The perception of
reality then becomes dependent upon the structure of information.

Hot and Cool Media

Marshall McLuhan's famous distinction between "hot" and "cool" media referred to the
different sensory effects associated with media of higher or lower definition. High-definition
("hot") media, such as print or radio, are full of information and allow for less sensory completion
or involvement on the part of the reader or listener than low-definition ("cool") media, such as
telephone or television, which are relatively lacking in information and require a higher sensory
involvement of the user. The form of each medium is associated with a different arrangement, or
ratio, in the order among the senses and thus creates new forms of awareness. These
transformations of perceptions are the bases of the meaning of the message. In this sense, "the
medium is the message."
Controversy always raged around McLuhan's work, for he was initiating a new paradigm which
required that we recognize the form our information takes as basic to the way that knowledge is
perceived and interpreted. The Mechanical Bride (1951) documents the power of advertising to
manage public consciousness. The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) presents a pattern of insights
into the cultural transformation created by print technology. With the publication
of Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan's reputation became worldwide. Of the several books
that followed, War and Peace in the Global Village (with Quentin Fiore, 1968), The Interior
Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan (collected,
1969), Counterblast (1969), From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson, 1970), and Take
Today: The Executive as Dropout (with Barrington Nevitt, 1972) are the most important.

Relevance of the Vision

A resurgence of interest in McLuhan's prescient work began in the early 1990s and is
still growing as the relevance of his vision is increasingly borne out by cultural events created by
the interplay of electric technologies. For example, the pattern of contemporary world conflict
reminds us of McLuhan's discovery that the main effect of electric process is to "retribalize" the
structure of social and psychic awareness, which stresses traditional identities to the point of
violence. He warned that the Global Village would not be a peaceful place. Also he understood
and described the effects of the coming Internet and Virtual Reality as early as 1964. He
forecast what he called "discarnate experience" flowing from relationships developed solely on
electronic bases.
Numerous international honours and awards were bestowed on McLuhan, including the
Schweitzer Chair (1967), which he spent at New York's Fordham University. The University of
Toronto's former Centre for Culture and Technology, which he founded and which was known
as "The Coach House," is now the McLuhan Program for Culture and Technology within the
Faculty of Information, with a research unit - the Coach House Institute. Further, a special
McLuhan Collection was founded at the U of T Faculty of Information Science in March 1995.
The McLuhan Teleglobe Canada Award, under the aegis of UNESCO, was created in 1983 in
honour of his pioneering work in Communications, and awarded for over two decades. McLuhan
was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1970.

Marshall McLuhan's Legacy in Culture and Scholarship

After his death in 1980 Marshall MCLUHAN's star at first seemed to wane. But in 1982
the INTERNET was born and McLuhan was invoked again in the context of two-way
interactive COMMUNICATION. With the advent of the personal COMPUTER, individuals and
organizations could now be linked electronically, instantaneously, and globally. The
establishment of the World Wide Web consortium in 1994 brought into operation what McLuhan
had written as early as 1962: "the next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of
consciousness - will include TELEVISION as its content, not as its environment, and will
transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument
could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass LIBRARY organization, retrieve the individual's
encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind." As
with so many other media forecasts, his prescience was remarkable.

In the mid-1990s McLuhan began to receive renewed attention from another quarter. Much of
the initial credit for bringing him back into the public mediasphere must go to Wired magazine,
established in 1993 and proclaiming itself The Magazine of the Digital Generation. McLuhan
was presented as the prophet of the digital generation, and the digital generation (re)discovered
him. Wired anointed him its Patron Saint and on its masthead in every issue was a photograph
of McLuhan and one of his aphorisms - or as he called them, "probes;" for example, "Ads are
the cave art of the twentieth century." Month by month readers were probed by McLuhan's
ideas, enhancing his image among the digerati.
As well as over a thousand articles, McLuhan wrote or co-wrote 9 books, of which several have
been published in new editions, and he edited or co-edited 5. Since his death 5 more of his
books, all co-written, comprising various aspects of his work, have been published
posthumously. To date scholars and writers have produced 3 biographies and 12 major studies
of his work, along with scores of articles. His image has been recorded in successive
generations of media, from film through optical disk to videotape. A 6-hour sampling has been
compiled into The Video McLuhan.
McLuhan's work has generated a huge amount of scholarship: articles, books, journals, public
lectures and international conferences - 44 around the world in 2011, the centenary of his birth.
His ideas and approaches have been incorporated into school and university curricula
everywhere. The online search term Marshall McLuhan generates over 5 million results. His
influence is felt most directly not only in the field of communication, but also in cultural studies,
media studies, and particularly media ecology.

The founding of the Media Ecology Association in 1998 was a significant milestone for the
academic world, acknowledging McLuhan's origination of the notion of media ecology and its
regularization and institutionalization by Neil Postman at New York University. It was Postman
who defined the discipline most simply - media ecology is the study of media as environments -
and expressed a central precept of media ecology when he said that a medium of
communication is an environment and not a machine. The discipline has been a central vehicle
for the sustenance and enhancement of McLuhan's work, as well as its application to research
and in cultural operation and production in the media.

McLuhan has affected virtually every field and discipline in the humanities and SOCIAL
SCIENCES, in EDUCATION, and in BUSINESS studies. His work has had an impact on artists,
musicians, novelists, media practitioners and policy makers, and it has been studied by
politicians, public officials, activists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and the clergy. We find his influences
in such current research topics as:
• Understanding McLuhan as a medium for the convergence between art and science
• The aesthetics of Marshall McLuhan: The medium as expressive form
• Is Toronto obsolete? Process and ambivalence in McLuhan's urban studies
• Theology in the electronic age: What Marshall McLuhan has to say to the theologians
• McLuhan meets convergence culture: towards a new multimodal discourse
• Marshall McLuhan's acoustic space
• Advertising, McLuhan and the creative revolution, 1965-1980
• Marshall McLuhan and the future of work in a world of information This small sample will serve
to indicate how contemporary research and scholarship continues to be guided and inspired by
McLuhan.

As a final consideration of McLuhan's legacy, and bearing in mind the perspective of his attitude
expressed when he said, " I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am
determined to understand what's happening," we may wonder how much his open exploration of
the future of media and communication has encouraged scientists and entrepreneurs to develop
new media such as social networking, online gaming and augmented reality.

McLuhan has received material commemoration as well. The UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO in

2010 revived the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology within the Faculty of Information,
which in turn has established the Coach House Institute to continue the McLuhan research
tradition. The old coach house itself, McLuhan's operational home, has been refurbished to
contemporary standards for new generations of students and researchers. On the campus of his
academic base, St. Michael's College, the City of Toronto has renamed a street Marshall
McLuhan Way.