Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born to Elsie and Herbert in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada of Scottish-Irish heritage. The conservative Catholic Canadian academic was one of the founders of critical media studies. McLuhan became a pop culture figure in the 1960s with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill[?], 1964) and The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with designer Quentin Fiore, Random House, 1967).
Famous for coining the phrases "The medium is the message" and "the global village[?]," McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound bite[?]. He asserted that each different medium affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot"--media which engaged one's senses in a high intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film--and "cool"--media which were of lower resolution or intensity, and therefore required more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television. While many of his pronouncements and theories were impenetrable, if not absurd, McLuhan's central message that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media, remains ever more true in the electronic age[?].
"Software" and "the global village" were terms coined by Marshall McLuhan, in his seminal work, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964).
Marshall McLuhan died December 31, 1980 of a cerebral stroke which plagued the last year of his life.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump