(July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature
, a literary critic
, a rhetoric
ian, and a communication theorist
. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory
, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.
McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message
" and "the global village
" and predicted the World Wide Web
almost thirty years before it was invented.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
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 the electric age.
Throughout Finnegans Wake|Finnegans Wake James Joyce|Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Francis Bacon|Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
Art is anything you can get away with.