Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian literary scholar and media theorist who taught at the University of Toronto. In The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media he argued that communication technologies reshape perception, thought and social organisation independently of the content they carry. His slogan 'the medium is the message' made him one of the best-known intellectuals of the 1960s and a founding figure of media studies.

Key ideas

• The medium is the message: the form of a medium transforms human experience more than any particular content it carries.
• Media are extensions of the human senses and body, and each new medium rebalances the senses.
• Print culture fostered linear, individualist and specialised habits of mind; electronic media bring back simultaneous, collective forms of experience.
• Electric media tie the world into a 'global village'.

Major works

• The Mechanical Bride (1951)
• The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
• The Medium Is the Massage (1967, with Quentin Fiore)

In the conversation

• Question What did McLuhan mean by ‘the medium is the message’? It sounds like a slogan Nur Aisyah Rahman · 5 replies