Marshall McLuhan

What Does Marshall McLuhan Mean?

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian writer, theoretician and academic. McLuhan wrote several popular books about media and technology in the 1960s, including “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man” and “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,” as well as “The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects” in 1967, and, the next year, “War and Peace in the Global Village,” a work that used James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” to study the phenomenon of war throughout human history.

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Techopedia Explains Marshall McLuhan

One of McLuhan’s most famous ideas was the concept centered around the phrase “the medium is the message” in which McLuhan described what could be called a kind of astral projection by which technologies extend people’s experiences and shape their consciousness.

In describing “hot” and “cool” mediums, McLuhan has suggested that the types of media that people use influence how they experience life, and that the emergence of global cybernetworks would change people’s interactions with each other.

In many ways, McLuhan’s work sheds light on the phenomena that follow the creation of a global internet – and asks questions about how a post-internet world is going to work. For example, in describing connected digital media as “more potent tools for manipulation and control,” McLuhan addresses the kinds of problems that today’s security experts have in confronting hackers and various types of cyber attacks.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…