Marshall McLuhan. Judith Fitzgerald

      The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

      – Marshall McLuhan

      What Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis, Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is to communication theory and cultural anthropology. One of the most influential intellectual mavericks of twentieth-century thought, McLuhan began his career working within the relatively obscure confines of the ivory tower where he toiled away polishing essays analyzing literature and creating lectures on how to appreciate its merits and values.

      Stylization, not imitation, was the key to McLuhan’s approach. His speciality was media and he simply overturned all assumptions concerning same: “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way,” he explained in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

      Something of a seer-savant, most likely a genius (but most assuredly a giant on our cultural landscape), Canada’s best-known visionary imagined the future and mapped its contours in living colour. Now, his magical and initially bewildering signature, “the medium is the message,” seamlessly supports his reputation as a “crisis” philosopher on the razor’s edge of the information revolution. More than any other single individual, McLuhan equipped the planet’s current population with the mental charts, graphs, maps, and practical means to learn its way through the maze of what he termed The Age of Information.

      Through his groundbreaking explorations, investigations, and “probes” (he believed a thinking person must poke and prod everything from language to reality to self-identity), McLuhan developed tools to respond to the overwhelming technological challenges that confront the information-glutted “contemporary anybodies” sleepwalking through life’s miraculous vistas (through no fault of their own).

      A humanist to the core, McLuhan discerned that the post-industrial world derives its unity from technological imperatives and corporate or political forces rather than from nature, social responsibilities, or human-scale requirements. Investigation of the electr(on)ic world’s media and methods has replaced philosophical inquiry into worlds both natural and mechanical. The media of communication in the age of information have replaced the means of production, the overriding system of the era of industrialization. Now, of course, it’s clear the worlds in the midst of a revolution–a breakup, breakdown, breakthrough – from the age of industry (where the means dominated) to the age of information (where the media dominate).

      Taking his cue from author and painter Wyndham Lewis’s observation that the “present cannot be revealed to people until it has become yesterday,” McLuhan points out individuals see only the past as part and parcel of what he termed “the rear-view mirror phenomenon” obscuring the present and obliterating the future.

      According to McLuhan, each new medium produces a new cultural environment that becomes invisible while making visible the one of the previous culture. Enter the artist, the only figure capable of apprehending what will happen since artists naturally see what is happening (or, by definition, they are not artists). The artist is a uniquely capable translator of the “invisible” cultural environment of the present.

      Doffing his thinking cap to poet