Happy 100th birthday, Marshall McLuhan! [HT Gary]
Have a look of Open Culture,”Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village”
Marshall McLuhan – The World is a Global Village (CBC TV)
Check out “Tom Wolfe on Marshall McLuhan for His 100th Would-Be Birthday”
Have a listen to CBC Jian Ghomeshi opening Q essay, “Jian on Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday“
Great and insightful report from CBC News (include comments from McLuhan’s son and other people who have met the man), “Marshall McLuhan’s legacy: Don’t downplay the comic books” [HT CBC Kirstine Stewart] Here is an excerpt,
“The internet age has done a hell of a job burnishing the reputation of Marshall McLuhan.
After all, the famously cerebral Toronto media theorist more or less foretold the world wide web back in 1962, when he wrote that “a computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”“
UK Guardian podcast & article (with an long quote from McLuhan’s classic essay), “The Big Ideas podcast: The medium is the message” [HT Doug Coupland] Here is an excerpt,
“The writing of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this Thursday, has entered popular jargon like that of few other modern intellectuals. Is there another line that has been quoted – and misquoted – as enthusiastically as ‘the medium is the message’? McLuhan, of course, was perfectly aware of his status as the thinker du jour of the media age, the man everyone liked to quote over dinner but hadn’t bothered to read – for proof, just watch Annie Hall.
But what does “the medium is the message” really mean? In the first episode of our new The Big Ideas series, Benjamen Walker gets to the bottom of the slogan with the help of Canadian novelist and McLuhan-biographer Douglas Coupland, academic Lance Strate, Marshal’s son Eric McLuhan, record producer John Simon, and the Guardian’s media correspondent Jemima Kiss.”
Here is an excerpt form Guardian Douglas Coupland, “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today – 100 years after the birth of the media visionary, ‘the medium is the message’ explains what Google and YouTube do to our souls“, (emphasis added)
“Over the years I’ve been asking people in my life who are old enough to remember which technological change felt more like a cathartic change to society: TV in the 1950s or the internet since 2000. Up until about 2006, everyone said TV. Since then – call me crazy, but I think it has to do with Google – it’s been the internet and all its spawn: YouTube, smartphones, Facebook, apps … and everything else that jackhammers away at the time we once reserved for books, newspapers, daydreaming and, ironically, TV.
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn’t go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California. We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.“
Have a read of University of Toronto Press blog “Celebrating Marshall McLuhan”
An excerpt from Toronto Star, “A century after his birth, Marshall McLuhan is ‘still ahead of us’“,
““Rereading him, I still get new insights,” says Robert Logan, a former colleague of the Canadian media guru some now call The First Seer of Cyberspace. “The man was a total genius. If he came back today, on his 100th anniversary, he would say, ‘Yeah, that’s about what I expected — and people haven’t learned a thing.”
Possibly, they never will.”
P.S. No idea until now that McLuhan‘s home base was my alma mater University of St. Michael’s College a college of the University of Toronto.
Update: Guardian, “Thanks Marshall, I think we’ve finally got the message… – Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media seem more insightful than ever“
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[…] to grow, learn and to be helpful to people. I can’t help but want to use this particular Marshall McLuhan quote when I think of you today. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our […]
[…] Happy 100th birthday, Marshall McLuhan in his own (and others’) words! […]