Max Coady
Monday, October 20, 2008
Marshall McLuhan
Born in Canada in 1911 to a real estate salesman and actress, McLuhan did not meet with academic success until college. He became interested in the way communication influences society. In 1959 he became the director of the Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of Education. It was during this project that McLuhan met with great critical success, winning the prestigious Governor General's Award. He believed that the most important aspect of media is the technical medium of communication. The medium, he claimed, was the message, and that 'print is the technology of individualism.' McLuhan foresaw electronic media as a powerful tool that would unify and stabilize the human race. He went on to write many successful and insightful books, including 'Understanding Media' and 'The Mechanical Bride.' McLuhan is best remembered as an influential writer, theorist, and educator of mass media in culture. He died in 1980, just years before the Internet revolution took flight.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Max,
I thought it was really interesting what McLuhan did before his success with understanding technology.
~Karen Borden
"Unify and stabilize the human race"
No way. For McLuhan Lucifer the first electrical engineer was in all electronic media. See his interviews with Father Babin. As far as critical success McLuhan never received it. He was always an outsider. He did get popular acclaim which only embittered his academic colleagues. His project was to say that each technology programs the human sensorium. Further these technological extensions outered us away from our chemical bodies (see Bob Dobbs and the five bodied theory) Print accelerated the effects of the alphabet and brought to a heighten mode individualism. As to the little academic success until college that's a worrysum thought.
Post a Comment