McLuhan Program - Research - Current Academic Research

"He predicted the Wikipedia as well! We become "encyclopedic" in the electronic age."

"He was a thinker who focused on the world. He thought about the world the way a great thinker does. His thinking was extremely original, not inductive or deductive. He was constantly discovering, as if feeling the shapes of knowledge with his hands. It's as if he was thinking not with his head but with all his senses... I'd say he did not deduce things, he perceived directly, like an artist. This is the best way to put it - he was an artist who worked with thinking as his material."

"Always the same one, "In the electronic age we wear all mankind as our skin," - not bad... It shows everyone's inteconnection. Everywhere we are in touch through our skin. We are all as interdependent as the cells in our body - with the same harmony."

"I think that the information highway has caught up with us. I think McLuhan had predicted that. Had we all read McLuhan carefully we would have seen exactly... would probably be faster and better, more ready to get on with it."

Eric McLuhan

"...he began asking: "What statemens can we make about media that anyone can test - prove or disprove - for himself? What do all media have in common? What do they do?" We expected to find a dozen or so such statements [...] We found these four ... and no more [namely, that a medium 1) extends/enhances (a human ability), 2) obsolesces (a prior medium) and 3) retrieves (another), 4) reverses (its own intended effects); see McLuhan quote above - cf. emphasis]. He spent the rest of his life looking for a fifth, if there be one, and simultaneously trying to find a single case in which one of the first four does not apply. [...] All the while, my father was exhorting colleagues, visitors and students - especially those at his Monday-night seminars at the Centre for Culture and Technology [italics ours] - to use the four laws to explore media, and to test the laws. Suddenly (I forget exactly when or with whom) we learned that they applied to more than what is conventionally called media: they were applicable to the products of all human endeavour, and also to the endeavour itself! [...] They worked. The floodgates burst. There were weeks and months heady with discovery and excitement...

"They must have the most profound significance for the arts and the sciences, and not simply because they erase the distinction between them. They also provide both with a common set of tools for forging ahead and backward - much the same thing in any case - for constantly mining and revitalizing the tradition each has...

"As you view and review [the five chapters of the book], please mine them for whatever you find useful, and leave the rest. They are about the word - but they are far from the last word."

"... I had the good fortune to collaborate with Marshall back in the 1970s and have tried to carry on his tradition, as have others, by focusing on the impact of media independent of their content... Examples of the intensification of effects with new media include McLuhan’s observations that with electronic media:

1. our involvement with each other would increase,
2. social structures and access to information would decentralize,
3. “consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player,”
4. the media become extensions of our psyches,
5. “the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing,”
6. there is a growth of interdisciplinarity,
7. a melting of national borders and the rise of a global village, and
8. “Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before — but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience”...

I am sure he is looking down from the great Internet in the sky and smiling at all the new developments he predicted over 40 years ago."