McLuhan is known for the expressions "the medium is the message" and "global village". McLuhan was a fixture in media discourse from the late 1960s to his death and he continues to be an influential and controversial figure. More than ten years after his death he was named the "patron saint" of Wired magazine.
I am not sure where this was found or who first shred it but I dug this up in an email that someone was spreading, and it feels like something we should keep spreading around, it said about him, "In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media
replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage
for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers) Instead
of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside
us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence,
and superimposed co-existence. [...:] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...:] In our long striving to recover for the
Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the
fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects. He argues that, if we
are not vigilant to the effects of media's influence, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule. Key to McLuhan's argument is
the idea that technology has no per se moral bent -- it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization: Is it not
obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...:] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that
detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the
phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric
technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it
would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our
technologies. It would be good for morality. The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan
contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If
there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent
in our technologies."<br/>Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the
usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger
surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's
work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Bill Stewart's Living Internet[34:] describes how McLuhan's "insights made the concept of a global
village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened." McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method,
and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America.
However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting
the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not
concerned to get any kudos out of [The Gutenberg Galaxy:]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be
a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report:] that I'm doing now."[citation needed:]<br/>McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest
literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime
intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.
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