Marshall McLuhan – 1911-1980

Although McLuhan was a Canadian, his major impact was on American popular culture, which he helped to shape in the 1960s with his analysis of the extraordinarily pervasive influence of television and computers on all modes of information and thought in virtually every cultural field. He declared that “the medium is the message” and predicted the obsolescence of the printed book, which would yield to electronic media destined to transform a diverse world into a “global village.”