100 Years - Marshall McLuhan

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Professor Marshall McLuhan is the high priest of pop culture and prophet of the electronic age. McLuhan was born in Canada in 1911 and during his life wrote a monumental amount of work, which included twelve books and hundreds of articles about understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. This subject would occupy most of McLuhan's career and a task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. Because he was one of the first to sound the alarm, McLuhan has gained the status of a cult hero. McLuhan said many things that are still pertinent today.

His thoughts are frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which sum up the more complicated content of his probing and rigorous examination of the media, a word that he coined. Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society. Professor Marshall McLuhan said:

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

In statements like this, McLuhan both announces the existence of a global village, another word he is credited for coining, and predicts the intensification of the world community to its present expression. All of this was done in the early 1960s at a time when television was still in its infancy, and the personal computer was almost twenty years into the future. Happy hundred, Professor McLuhan. You were truly ahead of your time

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125468451