As a continuation to our marathon of McLuhan related posts, one can justifiably ask what what makes Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan current in this age of the Internet, social media, simulation technologies, virtual realities, and digital culture?

In the information society and contemporary media culture, it should be stressed that McLuhan is an analyst and spokesman of mediatized culture. He understands media and technology as extensions of man (e.g., the wheel is the extention of the foot and the computer an extension of the central nervous system).

In his texts, McLuhan commented on the general media cultural developments and especially the electric and electronic age. Well known and apt is the theorist’s fateful summarization from the year 1964: In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

In McLuhan’s opinion, the content of every new technology and media is technology that has just been passed and cast aside. Therefore, it follows that movies are the content of television, novels are the content of movies, etc.

The media ecological thinking that is a part of “McLuhanism” attempts to identify media environments as the “new nature.” This is illustrated by citations from Essential McLuhan, the book edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (see 1997: 274):

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.” (1969)

“The new media are not ways of relating us to the old ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.” (1969)

“It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” (1964)

“The reader of the newspaper accepts the newspaper not so much as a highly artificial image having some correspondence to reality as he tends to accept it as reality itself. Perhaps the effect is for the media to substitute for reality just in the degree to which they become virtuosos of realistic detail.” (1978)

“The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.” (1978)

It must be emphasized that McLuhan was a technological determinist. The Canadian media theorist and visionary thinks the most important thing is to understand how digital technologies and extensions transform our culture – not so much what specific content is transmitted through the information and media networks.

Instead of semiotic and semantic content analysis, the techno-cultural “meta-level” becomes therefore crucial. This meta-level influences the structures of communities, cultures, and societies.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 and died in 1980. During the theorist’s lifetime, the mechanical paradigm of technology and machines changed first to electrical and electronic, to start to develop towards the digital paradigm in his autumn years.

Since 1952, McLuhan taught on a regular basis at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto. After the publication of his works, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extentions of Man (1964), he became one of the most significant commentators of the 1960s. Simultaneously, however, he became a polemic and controversial media intellectual whose works and thoughts divided the opinions of people.

McLuhan was a combination of scholar, artist, and prophet. He was an academically knowledgeable student of literature, jovial company, and a university professor. To the large audience, he was a confusing pop personality who was known to enjoy the company of the contemporary power elite and celebrities.

McLuhan’s status as a cult personality and key authority in the 1960s is clear. The name of the media thinker can justifiably be linked with the Zeitgeist of 1960s and with as various contemporary cultural thought leaders of the age as, for example, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Mick Jagger, Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane.

McLuhan was an apt and surprising media thinker whose central concepts are known to current readers through such polemic and complex key terms and slogans as “vortex,” “sensorium,” “sensory impact,” “extensions of man,” and “global village.”

It must be stated, however, that even though many were familiar with his name and some knew his dramatically formed slogans and key words, only a small portion of the reading public took the time to familiarize with his deeper mysteries and teachings.

McLuhan read constantly. And it is told, slightly surprisingly, that he did not watch very much television. Like the speakers of the antique, McLuhan loved speech (and liked to refer to Cicero often). Speech was his most important form of communication, in interviews, lectures, and conversations, but also as a typographic flow of thought on the pages of books. Instead of solid argumentation, his publications often represent a kind of theory poetry and poetic word art.

Observations about the Canadian thinker’s life often emphasize his Catholic faith (McLuhan was a convert) as the origin of cultural philosophic ideas pertaining to universalism, electronic technology and the “global village.” The Roman-Catholic faith is an important aspect but the importance of McLuhan’s geographic and socio-economic background is often underestimated.

It is suitable to ask what is left of McLuhan’s varied life – what is McLuhan’s substance as a cultural philosopher, media theorist, or visionary? There are of course many answers and interpretations. The followers and supporters of the “media guru” remember McLuhan’s many books – with the subject matters varying from communication, literature, and art to sociology and pedagogy.

Out of his publications, at least The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) seem to have become classics which have bearing on digital culture and its special characteristics.