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98-438: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan , in which he analyzes the effects of mass media , especially the printing press , on European culture and human consciousness . It popularized the term global village , which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy , which we may regard today to refer to

196-527: A Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford . Though having already earned his BA and MA in Manitoba, Cambridge required him to enroll as an undergraduate "affiliated" student, with one year's credit towards a three-year bachelor's degree , before entering any doctoral studies . He went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1934, studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis , and was influenced by New Criticism . Years afterward, upon reflection, he credited

294-512: A Catholic college of the University of Toronto , where Hugh Kenner would be one of his students. Canadian economist and communications scholar Harold Innis was a university colleague who had a strong influence on his work. McLuhan wrote in 1964: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing." In

392-531: A book. Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book." Such apparent arbitrariness fits with picking a particular piece (or part) of a mosaic and deciding if you like it. Certainly the McLuhan test can be applied to the Gutenberg Galaxy itself. Doing so will reveal a further insight into

490-430: A dialogue." All the world%27s a stage All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then

588-412: A fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies." Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: "The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction ... is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word 'evolution'.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to

686-486: A highly favorable review of this new book in America . However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award,

784-527: A letter to Walter Ong, dated 31 May 1953, McLuhan reports that he had received a two-year grant of $ 43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal. At a Fordham lecture in 1999, Tom Wolfe suggested that a major under-acknowledged influence on McLuhan's work

882-429: A medium. Using terminology derived from French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss 's distinction between hot and cold societies, McLuhan argues that a cool medium requires increased involvement due to decreased description, while a hot medium is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in streaming content but does not consider

980-575: A mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism , democracy, Protestantism , capitalism and nationalism . For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification." In

1078-469: A mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: individualism , democracy, Protestantism , capitalism , and nationalism . For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification ." In

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1176-438: A new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. McLuhan's episodic history takes

1274-447: A phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for

1372-438: A phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.… In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for

1470-457: A private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term surfing to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as " Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson 's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores

1568-708: A private matter. He had a lifelong interest in the number three (e.g., the trivium, the Trinity ) and sometimes said that the Virgin Mary provided intellectual guidance for him. For the rest of his career, he taught in Catholic institutions of higher education. Unable to find a suitable job in Canada, he went to the United States to take a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for

1666-576: A separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium Is the Massage ) is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects social organization : print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual homogenizing of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters

1764-520: A separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage ) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters

1862-567: A series of ages was a commonplace of art and literature, which Shakespeare would have expected his audiences to recognize. The number of ages varied: three and four being the most common among ancient writers such as Aristotle . The concept of seven ages derives from ancient Greek philosophy. Solon , the Athenian lawgiver, described life as 10 periods of 7 years in the following elegiac verses: "In seven years from th' earliest breath, The child puts forth his hedge of teeth; When strengthened by

1960-728: A similar span, He first displays some signs of man. As in a third, his limbs increase, A beard buds o'er his changing face. When he has passed a fourth such time, His strength and vigour's in its prime. When five times seven years o'er his head Have passed, the man should think to wed; At forty two, the wisdom's clear To shun vile deed of folly or fear: While seven times seven years to sense Add ready wit and eloquence. And seven years further skill admit To raise them to their perfect height. When nine such periods have passed, His powers, though milder grown, still last; When God has granted ten times seven, The aged man prepares for heaven." In Psalm 90 , attributed to Moses, it

2058-549: A stroke which affected his ability to speak. The University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies tried to close his research center shortly thereafter, but was deterred by substantial protests. McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and died in his sleep on December 31, 1980. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Thornhill , Ontario, Canada. During his years at Saint Louis University (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral dissertation and

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2156-711: A teacher and aspiring actress from Fort Worth , Texas, whom he married on August 4, 1939. They spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940) and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts. While the McLuhans were in England, World War II had erupted in Europe. For this reason, he obtained permission to complete and submit his dissertation from

2254-403: Is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture , print culture , cultural studies , media ecology or media-adequacy . Throughout the book, McLuhan makes efforts to reveal how communication technology (i.e., alphabetic writing , the printing press , and the electronic media ) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization: [I]f

2352-462: Is a youth till the completion of the growth of his whole body, which coincides with the fourth seven years. Then he is a man till he reaches his forty-ninth year, or seven times seven periods. He is a middle aged man till he is fifty-six, or eight times seven years old; and after that he is an old man." Because of such sanctity in the number seven, Philo says, Moses wrote of the creation of the world in seven stages. In medieval philosophy as well, seven

2450-541: Is also the character of global village." The culture of the manuscript (literally hand-writing) is often referred to by McLuhan as scribal culture . Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of the art of memory, central to scribal culture. Associated with this epoch is the Art of memory (in Latin Ars Memoriae). Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Finnegans Wake (like Shakespeare's King Lear )

2548-463: Is also written, "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away." The Jewish Philosopher Philo of Alexandria writes in his work 'On Creation': " Hippocrates the physician says that there are Seven ages of man, infancy, childhood, boyhood, youth, manhood, middle age, old age; and that these too, are measured by periods of seven, though not in

2646-415: Is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory . He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge . He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies ". McLuhan coined

2744-464: Is composed of 59 short essays that may be read in any order—what he styled the " mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article, or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their symbolism , as well as their implications for

2842-466: Is essentially an oral tribal culture. The transition from this oral culture takes place when the child is taught to read and write. Then the child enters the world of the manuscript culture. McLuhan identifies James Joyce 's Finnegans Wake as a key that unlocks something of the nature of the oral culture." Of particular importance to the Oral Culture is the Art of memory . In commenting on

2940-406: Is identical. He notes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book can be reread at will, but a movie must be screened again in its entirety to study any part of it. In the first part of Understanding Media , McLuhan writes that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume

3038-446: Is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality . The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts

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3136-444: Is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality. The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts

3234-464: Is not dead. In schools or at home or in the street, where children are taught to learn by heart, to memorize, nursery rhymes or poems or songs, then they can be said to participate in the oral tradition. The same is often true of the children belonging to religious groups who are taught to learn to say their prayers. In other words, childhood is one of the ages of man (in Shakespeare's sense) and

3332-533: Is one of the texts which McLuhan frequently uses throughout the book to weave together the various strands of his argument. Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. His episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic tribal humankind to the electronic age . According to McLuhan,

3430-561: Is the global village . The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy , but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments : Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into

3528-494: Is the global village . The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy , but McLuhan himself was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments: Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into

3626-454: Is the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the " noosphere ." In fact, McLuhan warns against outright dismissing or whole-heartedly accepting de Chardin's observations early on in his second published book The Gutenberg Galaxy : This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls

3724-469: The Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction , in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye . Marshall McLuhan Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC ( / m ə ˈ k l uː ən / , mə- KLOO -ən ; July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work

3822-448: The Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction , in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye . McLuhan's best-known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a seminal study in media theory. Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in

3920-462: The Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins , McLuhan remarks: In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out

4018-545: The Renaissance was not the rediscovery of ancient texts, but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and grammar. Modern life is characterized by the re-emergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the New Criticism of Richards and Leavis. McLuhan also began the academic journal Explorations with anthropologist Edmund "Ted" Carpenter . In

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4116-533: The Toronto School of communication theory , together with Harold Innis , Eric A. Havelock , and Northrop Frye . During this time, McLuhan supervised the doctoral thesis of modernist writer Sheila Watson on the subject of Wyndham Lewis . Hoping to keep him from moving to another institute, the University of Toronto created the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCT) in 1963. From 1967 to 1968, McLuhan

4214-542: The University of Manitoba in 1928. After studying for one year as an engineering student, he changed majors and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1933), winning a University Gold Medal in Arts and Sciences. He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree (1934) in English from the university as well. He had long desired to pursue graduate studies in England and was accepted by Trinity Hall, Cambridge , having failed to secure

4312-526: The corporate entities who created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. Roland Barthes's essays 1957 Mythologies , echoes McLuhan's Mechanical Bride , as a series of exhibits of popular mass culture (like advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs) that are analyzed in a semiological way. Written in 1961 and first published by University of Toronto Press , The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)

4410-506: The trivium at Cambridge, he took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1937, founded on his reading of G. K. Chesterton . In 1935, he wrote to his mother: Had I not encountered Chesterton I would have remained agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of religious faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me

4508-538: The "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence. In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: "I am not

4606-520: The 1936–37 academic year. From 1937 to 1944, he taught English at Saint Louis University (with an interruption from 1939 to 1940 when he returned to Cambridge). There he taught courses on Shakespeare , eventually tutoring and befriending Walter J. Ong , who would write his doctoral dissertation on a topic that McLuhan had called to his attention, as well as become a well-known authority on communication and technology. McLuhan met Corinne Lewis in St. Louis,

4704-534: The United States, without having to return to Cambridge for an oral defence. In 1940, the McLuhans returned to Saint Louis University, where they started a family as he continued teaching. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in December 1943. He next taught at Assumption College in Windsor , Ontario, from 1944 to 1946, then moved to Toronto in 1946 where he joined the faculty of St. Michael's College ,

4802-528: The accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books. McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls the Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, " The medium is the message ," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type

4900-448: The advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the Gutenberg press was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from William Ivins ' Prints and Visual Communication , McLuhan remarks: In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out

4998-687: The arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives. McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, in Edmonton , Alberta, and was named "Marshall" from his maternal grandmother's surname. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. His parents were both also born in Canada: his mother, Elsie Naomi (née Hall), was a Baptist school teacher who later became an actress; and his father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan,

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5096-424: The book, McLuhan turns his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion . At this point, his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous aphorism "

5194-499: The considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies". Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years after The Gutenberg Galaxy , and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied

5292-514: The considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies." Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy

5390-417: The drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in

5488-674: The early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars at the University of Toronto, funded by the Ford Foundation . As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities. During this period, he published his first major work, The Mechanical Bride (1951), in which he examines the effect of advertising on society and culture. Throughout the 1950s, he and Edmund Carpenter also produced an important academic journal called Explorations . McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as

5586-408: The early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence " wherein electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity , with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization

5684-410: The early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media would replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization

5782-438: The electric age. The book is unusual in its design. McLuhan described it as one which "develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems". The mosaic image to be constructed from data and quotations would then reveal "causal operations in history". The book consists of five parts: The main body of the book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", consists of 107 short "chapters". Apparently, McLuhan also had some ideas about how to browse

5880-451: The expression " the medium is the message " in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village . He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with

5978-616: The faculty there with influencing the direction of his later work because of their emphasis on the "training of perception", as well as such concepts as Richards' notion of " feedforward ". These studies formed an important precursor to his later ideas on technological forms. He received the required bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1936 and entered their graduate program. At the University of Manitoba, McLuhan explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty," later referring to this stage as agnosticism. While studying

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6076-417: The first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism . If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this

6174-416: The first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus, print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this

6272-477: The fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization : Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?… Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in

6370-474: The fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization: Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in

6468-437: The highly literate community." Some of McLuhan's main ideas were influenced or prefigured by anthropologists like Edward Sapir and Claude Lévi-Strauss , arguably with a more complex historical and psychological analysis. The idea of the retribalization of Western society by the far-reaching techniques of communication, the view on the function of the artist in society, and the characterization of means of transportation, like

6566-434: The invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography . (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic /logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms .) Print culture , ushered in by

6664-458: The lean and slippered pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything ~William Shakespeare The comparison of

6762-632: The light bulb as a clear demonstration of this. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, but it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces at night that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan writes, "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulates that content has little effect on society—for example, whether television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, its effect on society

6860-475: The lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into

6958-399: The manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as a book, titled The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man , which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it. McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts ( grammar , logic , and rhetoric —collectively known as the trivium ) from

7056-502: The medium is the message " (elaborated in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , 1964) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media. His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book Culture and Environment by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson , and the title The Mechanical Bride is derived from a piece by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp . The Mechanical Bride

7154-451: The modern world "we live mythically and integrally…but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age." McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". His insight is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content it delivers, but by its own characteristics. McLuhan points to

7252-518: The purpose of his own book. McLuhan declares his book to be "complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord ." The latter work follows on from the Homeric studies of Milman Parry who turned to "the study of the Yugoslave epics" to prove that the poems of Homer were oral compositions. The book may also be regarded as a way of describing four epochs of history: For the break between

7350-619: The railroad and the airplane, as means of communication, are prefigured in Sapir's 1933 article on Communication in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , while the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media draws from Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies. McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. In

7448-541: The reader from pre-alphabetic, tribal humankind to the electronic age . According to McLuhan, the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography . (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic or logogramic writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or ideograms .) Print culture, ushered in by

7546-510: The reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery. At the end of March 1937, McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, when he was formally received into the Catholic Church . After consulting a minister, his father accepted the decision to convert. His mother, however, felt that his conversion would hurt his career and was inconsolable. McLuhan was devout throughout his life, but his religion remained

7644-430: The same order. And he speaks thus; ``In the nature of man there are seven seasons, which men call ages; infancy, childhood, boyhood, and the rest. He is an infant till he reaches his seventh year, the age of the shedding of his teeth. He is a child till he arrives at the age of puberty, which takes place in fourteen years. He is a boy till his beard begins to grow, and that time is the end of a third period of seven years. He

7742-520: The sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [ The Gutenberg Galaxy ]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now." McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award,

7840-439: The then Soviet Union , McLuhan puts "the advertising and PR community" on a par with them in so far that both "are concerned about access to the media and about results." More remarkably he asserts that "Soviet concern with media results is natural to any oral society where interdependence is the result of instant interplay of cause and effect in the total structure. Such is the character of a village, or since electric media, such

7938-521: The time of Cicero down to the time of Thomas Nashe. In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the trivium to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of Western culture . McLuhan suggests that the Late Middle Ages , for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to

8036-463: The time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible, the hand-writing terminates the oral phase, the printing and the electricity revolutionizes afterwards culture and society. Given the clue of "hand-writing" that terminates the "oral phase" one expects "printing" to terminate the manuscript phase and the "electrifying" to bring an end to the Gutenberg era. The strangeness of

8134-399: The tool's effects is not allowing an "extension of ourselves". A movie is thus said to be "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value: "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than

8232-429: The use of "electrifying" is entirely appropriate in the McLuhan context of 1962. The Internet did not exist then. McLuhan himself suggests that the last section of his book might play the major role of being the first section: The last section of the book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," deals with the clash of electric and mechanical, or print, technologies, and the reader may find it the best prologue. The oral tradition

8330-424: The visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but

8428-420: The visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.… The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but

8526-561: The ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Later, Bill Stewart 's 2007 "Living Internet" website describes how McLuhan's "insights made the concept of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened." McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong 's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy . Ong wrote

8624-514: The ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution. McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy . Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America . However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting

8722-413: The web technology seen today 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

8820-431: The world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century treatise. Ultimately the words derive from quod fere totus mundus exercet histrionem (because almost the whole world are actors) attributed to Petronius , a phrase which had wide circulation in England at the time. In his own earlier work, The Merchant of Venice , Shakespeare also had one of his main characters, Antonio , comparing

8918-422: The world to a stage and people to actors long predated Shakespeare. Richard Edwards ' play Damon and Pythias , written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, "Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage". When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare's own theatre, The Globe , may have used the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem (All

9016-419: The world to a stage: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. In his work The Praise of Folly , first printed in 1511, Renaissance humanist Erasmus asks, "For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage." Likewise the division of human life into

9114-649: Was a Methodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton. When the business failed at the start of World War I , McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian Army . After a year of service, he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front lines. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg , Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in

9212-591: Was considered an important number, as for example the seven deadly sins . King Henry V had a tapestry illustrating the seven ages of man. According to T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's version of the concept of the ages of man is based primarily upon Pier Angelo Manzolli 's book Zodiacus Vitae , a school text he might have studied at the Stratford Grammar School, which also enumerates stages of human life. He also takes elements from Ovid and other sources known to him. In fact, Shakespeare developed

9310-616: Was made a Companion of the Order of Canada . In 1975, the University of Dallas hosted him from April to May, appointing him to the McDermott Chair. Marshall and Corinne McLuhan had six children: Eric , twins Mary and Teresa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Michael. The associated costs of a large family eventually drove him to advertising work and accepting frequent consulting and speaking engagements for large corporations, including IBM and AT&T . In September 1979, McLuhan suffered

9408-674: Was named the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at Fordham University in the Bronx. While at Fordham, he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor , which was treated successfully. He returned to Toronto where he taught at the University of Toronto for the rest of his life and lived in Wychwood Park , a bucolic enclave on a hill overlooking the downtown where Anatol Rapoport was his neighbour. In 1970, he

9506-402: Was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term " surfing " to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like " Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson 's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores

9604-473: Was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism , dualism , domination of rationalism , automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended

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