Marshall McLuhan
The structural recipe calls for opening with a single defining work, but the FACTS list does not name any specific work by McLuhan. The closest available anchor is his description as "the father of media studies," which points concretely to his intellectual identity without requiring a title the facts do not supply.
Marshall McLuhan was born on 21 July 1911, in Edmonton, and was raised in Winnipeg. He attended Kelvin High School before going on to study at the University of Manitoba and later at Trinity Hall. His occupations spanned philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, and writing, a range that positioned him across several disciplines throughout his working life. In 1946 he moved to the University of Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his life as a university teacher.
The recognition his work attracted in Canada was formal and varied. He received the Molson Prize, the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction, and the Companion of the Order of Canada. He was also designated a Person of National Historic Significance — a designation conferred by the Canadian state.
He has been described as "the father of media studies," a characterization that marks his place within the intellectual history of the field. McLuhan died in Toronto on 31 December 1980, having spent the final decades of his career at the University of Toronto, the institution with which his name remained associated from 1946 until his death.
Quotes by Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan's insights on:
Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody.
To say that a body or its gravitational field ‘bends in space’ in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.
The Newtonian God – the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew – died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
The “child” was an invention of the 17th century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.
Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment – of what’s really going on – affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.