Marshall McLuhan

As a man who led the United States into the modern era of media, Marshall McLuhan was revered as an intellectual and considered one of the most important thinkers next to Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.  Author David Skinner argues that, "In a milieu that took as its dictate to 'modify consciousness' and 'to organize new modes of sensibility," Marshall McLuhan played the role of a leading commentator, explaining the new world to the rest of us" (2000).  In the 1960's and continuing into the 1970's and on, print media was soon outshone by the ever-more glamorous television productions.  This was a new era, one where children were growing up in a different sensorial environment than their parents, where television dominated the media and alienated them from their print-reared parents (Skinner 2000).  McLuhan's work helped to deconstruct the new mass media as he described it as an "extension of our senses," a place where texts served as repositories of communication data and experiences and where they were considered presentations instead of representations (Beck et al., 2005).  He opened up a new world to people--a medium--where new media created new environments and changed the lives of people within it.    

McLuhan's Main Ideas

Ratio of senses:  Human nature is divisible; therefore, in order to understand current human phenomena, the dominant part should be isolated.  For example, once print became wide-spread and a common source of media, human sight became dominant due to the increase in literacy and the decline of oral tradition.  
Medium is the message: This refers to the idea that the medium itself presents a message as a whole, mainly concerning how society functions.  He uses the example of a newspaper to illustrate this.  The newspaper is made up of two parts: the bad news and its apostrophe, advertisements.  The content is redetermined by the medium and reflects the society from which it came.  Thus, the medium becomes the message as it highlights the faults of society. 
Global Village: Because of modern communication, messages can be transported instantaneously, thus connecting the world in a way it has not previously seen.  Technology allows the lives of individuals and societies to become public, ultimately introducing a new way to see the world: as one large village.
Media as extensions of man: Technology makes a human--it determines which senses will be dominate and how they will contribute to social consequences.  According to this idea, any changes in the hierarchy of a person's senses changes that person's self.  Skinner states, "Industrial or visual man, who, by way of economics, is divided into rational parts, is the ultimate individualist because of the divisions he has learned from the alphabet and the printing press. Tribal or audile-tactile man is the ultimate communitarian because of the sense of oneness he has with his immediate surroundings--the result of his reliance on his hearing and sense of touch" (2000).  The primary media of these cases extend the senses to which they correspond and recreate the world in their image.