The McLuhan Global Research Network welcomes you to this touchpoint for resources on Marshall McLuhan, where you can find links to local and international researchers, scholars, and practitioners who extend McLuhan’s insights into the 21st century.
Signs abound indicating that Marshall McLuhan lives again in the 21st Century, as the media and cultural transformations that he diagnosed continue to unfold. Lewis Lapham writes that McLuhan makes more sense now than ever in his introduction to the republished Understanding Media. TV and radio shows mention McLuhan. Plays are written, and performed in San Francisco and Ottawa. In Toronto, the McLuhan family prevents a Jason Sherman play from being performed, as it takes liberties with McLuhan’s persona. A CD-ROM appears in the 1990s, and many now have trouble running it, thus showing the obsolescence of the once new medium, while brilliantly showing how his ideas hold up in new media formats. The Economist and other magazines that once disdained Canada’s intellectual comet now routinely refer to McLuhan in discussions of the meaning of new media.
McLuhan as intellectual and pop icon has survived the millenium, and become part of the invisible background to our thought. A computer-weaned generation turns to McLuhan as it explores the invention and habitation of new media environments. An interdiscipline emerges, called Media Ecology, deeply inspired by McLuhan, Innis and their heirs including the late Neil Postman. Baby boomers watch in amazement as the once revolutionary impacts of television collide with the subversive effects of inter-networked digital media.