Happy birthday, Marshall McLuhan
I remember even in my early years of graduate school, I heard somewhere the phrase “the medium is the message”. While I can’t recall where I saw a debate on whether Canadian Marshall McLuhan had actually written “the medium is the message” as such (and I recall having seen an online debate about it), it’s been widely accepted as a key McLuhan phrase. It’s been at least linked once.
By the way, thanks Lois Patterson and Robert Ballantyne for extracts of McLuhan’s works (also thanks to Karen Quinn Fung for this discussion on Marshall McLuhan and Me. My good friend Jesse Hirsch is involved in the 100th anniversary celebration of McLuhan’s birthday in Toronto (check McLuhan 100). I’m an academic nerd, so I am fascinated by academic studies and analyses, and media unfortunately does not escape my analytical mind. I always keep thinking (for better or worse) on the future of media, on the impact of social media in the transformation of the media landscape and the global evolution of society in a fully connected, networked world.
It’s clear that McLuhan had a big impact in society, and in the way we think about media, communications and the evolutionary structure of connection amongst individuals. Happy birthday, Marshall McLuhan.
