Here’s one of the most comprehensive Marshal McLuhan sites on the web.
One of the most charismatic, controversial and original thinkers of our time whose remarkable perception propelled him onto the international stage, Marshall McLuhan is universally regarded as the father of communications and media studies and prophet of the information age
The site above contains seemingly everything McLuhan related that exists, but that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, as is the promo quote above. But not by much. One imagines that some YouTube McLuhan videos aren’t cited above, and that there are in fact other fathers of communications and media studies, and other prophets of the information age.
For example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was talking about (1922) the “Noosphere” of a globe encircled by a real time envelope of human knowledge, communication, and consciousness, years before McLuhan “burst upon the scene”. Below McLuhan talks “Global Village”, a phrase he coined.
BTW, and this might not be commonly known, McLuhan was a practicing and committed Roman Catholic, as was Chardin…who was a Catholic priest. Is there something about Catholicism or Christianity, or religion in general, that encourages the imagination of “the supernatural”? Today, “the supernatural” seems perhaps similar to a place one can go by putting on a pair of VR goggles. This YouTube below explores the “noosphere” idea by adding current context, possibly a bit idealistically or spiritually optimistic, given what we know about human nature and the human condition. But then again, are we really fully aware of all that the “New Place” might become? Could it be a place where a different form of humanity becomes the predominant form? (a “better form”?)
McLuhan would say we are probably NOT perceiving the “New Place”, and all the changes it is bringing, because we are encompassed by it.
Douglas Coupland, an interesting man in his own write (Generation X and many novels) published a biography of McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! – November 30, 2010. He had this to say about McLuhan’s religion or spirituality:
Marshall, like most converts (age 25), quickly became hard core. He went to Mass almost daily every day for the rest of his life. He recited the rosary. He was a firm believer in Hell. He was disgusted that other Catholics weren’t Catholic enough. Above all, he believed that because God made the world, it must, in the end, be comprehensible, and that a sense of the divine could lead to an understanding of the mundane.
He came to see that his religion was indeed a sense, a sensory perception that colored his life as much as, if not more so than, sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell, or gravity. He’d found his key to eternity and was now free to turn his full and detached attention to the merely human and societal “future.” The future, compared to Heaven, was down-market, to be viewed dispassionately, as though prognosticating an ant farm, a kind of acutely observant obliviousness.
McLuhan also had 6 children. This picture of McLuhan contrasts so sharply with our perception of McLuhan as a hip, ultra modern, and “with it” thinker. But it might point to an important dimension of media studies, global villages, sense ratios, and the fate of mankind undergoing such change.
It is possible that current trends of rapid exchanging of personas, and avatars, and online presences, may get us in touch with some “transcendent” approaches to what we might think of as “reality”. IOW a supernatural element might become the background for perception of who we are, as it seems to have done for McLuhan 50 years ago. Or not. Who can say? Is there another McLuhan out there to reveal our fate?
There is certainly a rich context from which to ask those sorts of questions ranging from a slew of western philosophers, such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and many others, to ancient spiritual and supernatural perspectives of the east, such as Vedanta, Daoism and Buddhism. It seems such a “spiritual” or philosophical perspective is often absent in many current perspectives on where we are going…such as the “singularity” vision.. But if we know anything about the human story, we will find our way to a spiritual perspective at some point. So, maybe it’s not so strange that McLuhan was firmly embedded in one.
Is the current trend for identifying with superheroes in any way similar to how Romans and Greeks identified with the stories of the gods, which were “incursions of the supernatural into everyday life”?