Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980) The world-renowned visionary once labelled by Tom Wolfe as, "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov" in his article, What If He Is Right?, wrote the seminal works The Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media, and coined the terms The medium is the message and the Global Village which have become such a part of our daily language that we tend to forget the original voice. ksihra@mcluhanfestival.com

The Global Village returns to Toronto! Spend 1O Future Days living at the speed of thought, to experience the ultimate blend of high-tech and culture.

The smart, the curious, the well-educated. Ages depend on the program. Younger people will go for the Queen West action; academics, poetry buffs and McLuhanatics will flock to the U of T; each of our ten theme Future Days will appeal to specific interest groups, Green Day, China Day, Design Day, School Day and so forth; and our free public exhibits at City Hall, Dundas Square and the Design Exchange will attract thousands. How many? We don't know, but we're projecting a paid attendance of 20,000 plus.

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." (McLuhan 7) Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, "The medium is the message." But what does it mean? How can the medium be its own message?

The High Priest of Pop-Culture In this article we will begin an examination of someone who most people do not know, but who is considered by many to be the first father and leading prophet of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan. A Canadian born in 1911, McLuhan became a Christian through the influence of G.K. Chesterton in 1937. He wrote his monumental work, one of twelve books and hundreds of articles, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. Because he was one of the first to sound the alarm, McLuhan has gained the status of a cult hero and "high priest of pop-culture".{1} This status is not undeserved, and McLuhan said many things that are still pertinent today. His thought, though voluminous, is frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which sum up the more complicated content of his probing and rigorous examination of the media, a word that he coined. Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society, he said: If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?{2}