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, was a Methodist with a real-estate business in Edmonton.

[23] 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.

[23] Years afterward, upon reflection, he credited 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".

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,"[29] later referring to this stage as agnosticism.

He taught me the reasons for all that in me was simply blind anger and misery.At the end of March 1937,[b] McLuhan completed what was a slow but total conversion process, when he was formally received into the Catholic Church.

There he taught courses on Shakespeare,[39] 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.

They spent 1939–40 in Cambridge, where he completed his master's degree (awarded in January 1940)[28] and began to work on his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts.

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 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.

McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their symbolism, as well as their implications for 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.

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.

[h] The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:[49] 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.

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 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 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:[65] 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 the first instance.

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.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."

[68] 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.

Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in 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.

"[77] Some media, such as movies, are hot—that is, they enhance a single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image.

Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:[80] The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on.Furthermore, when Wired magazine interviewed him in 1995, Debray said he saw McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.… McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology.

The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan interrupted by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought.

The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd:[97] Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing.

In his posthumous book, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (1989), McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provides a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network.

The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow"[100] inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view.

[101] Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry.

"[104] McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality.

In his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin observed how, in perceptions of modern Western culture, from about the 19th century a shift began from the optic toward the haptic.

'"[115] During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Hugh Kenner, and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau[116] and Jerry Brown.

by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it.

But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue—the subtitle is 'An Inventory of Effects,' underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.