In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and completely transformed the way we understand communications. With his memorable aphorisms “the medium is the message” and “the global village,” McLuhan was one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century.
Many of McLuhan’s predictions have come true with the onset of globalization, the rise of the Internet, and continued technological advances in the areas of computers and telecommunications.
With such success, one would assume that the University of Toronto, where McLuhan spent most of his teaching career, would have a larger think tank dedicated to probing the implications of his work—or at least a college named after him, like his spiritual mentor, Harold Innis, has.
Sure, St. Joseph Street is known as “Marshall McLuhan Way,” and there is a small plaque about him pinned to a red brick house on the same street.
His legacy continues here at U of T with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, which explores the nature and effects of the things we conceive and create in all media. A group known as the Coach House Institute, the stewards of the program, announced their plans for the program at a seminar at the Faculty for Information Studies on Oct. 14.
But the most tangible symbol of McLuhan’s legacy is a quaint but crumbling building at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent that houses the McLuhan Program. The Coach House, as it is affectionately known, seems inadequately modest in comparison with the ideas of its former occupant. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message from U of T appears to be one of apathy.
After his death in 1980, U of T shut down McLuhan’s program and re-opened it only after worldwide protest. Furthermore, it took former program director Derrick de Kerkchove over three years to attach McLuhan’s name to his own graduate program. And even after that heroic effort, the program only received a $20,000, non-renewable, one-year grant.
Fortunately, subsequent directors of the program have been able to extend its intellectual influence beyond the modest appearance of its home. It has been mainly through their efforts that McLuhan has not faded from view. The program receives significant institutional support from the Faculty of Information Studies at U of T as an independent research and teaching unit. It has also carried out several educational and academic projects inspired by McLuhan’s work, and continues to operate along the same guidelines as it did when it first opened in the 1960s.
That causes some relief for this unapologetic McLuhan-atic, but I still feel more needs to be done to promote McLuhan’s legacy—namely, educating the public about his continued influence. McLuhan understood that Canada, as a country detached from the epicent of world affairs, is the perfect place to study communications. Hopefully, the Coach House Institute will be able to shed more light on this and on “Canada’s Intellectual Comet,” so that he can shine more brightly in the future.
