In Their Own Words

Humour

“I don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish.”

McLuhan used this quote constantly to explain his core concept of the environment. He argued that when we are totally immersed in a system like a medium or a culture, we become oblivious to it. Just as water is invisible to a fish because it is everywhere, our media environment is invisible to us. We only notice it when we are “beached”, when the system fails or changes. McLuhan often said “Humor is the only way to survive the transitions of life.”

 

Professional Activities

Marshall McLuhan’s career evolved from traditional English scholarship at the University of Toronto to a revolutionary systems based analysis of how technology reshapes human society. As the founder of the Centre for Culture and Technology, he proposed that media act as extensions of the human body, fundamentally altering our psyche and social structures.

During the 1960s, McLuhan rose to global prominence as the Oracle of the Electronic Age. He earned this reputation through his prophetic insights into electronic media, famously encapsulated in landmark texts like Understanding Media. Beyond academia, McLuhan was an experimental publisher and a highlevel consultant for corporations like IBM and AT&T, where he analyzed how electronic information speeds would decentralize business models.

A master of the probe, McLuhan used television, radio, and graphic design to deliver provocative aphorisms such as “the medium is the message”to alert the public to their invisible technological environments. By blurring the lines between intellectual theory, corporate strategy, and media performance, McLuhan created a new language for the 20th century forcing the world to recognize the systemic impact of the tools it created.

 

Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy

• Toronto School: Along with figures such as Harold Innis, he helped establish an intellectual movement that became known as the Toronto School that treated communication systems as central to social organization and historical change.
• Centre for Culture and Technology: This became the institutional home for interdisciplinary systems-oriented inquiry of the Toronto School.
•  Public discussions of media change: His books, lectures, and interviews gave Canadians a vocabulary for understanding television, advertising, and electronic media as environment-shaping systems rather than neutral tools.
• 1960’s national impact: During a period of rapid modernization his ideas helped Canadian educators, journalists, and policy-minded readers think about the cultural effects of new communications technologies.
• International recognition from Canada: McLuhan made Canadian scholarship globally visible, showing that a Canadian intellectual tradition could lead major debates about media, technology, and society.

 

Contributions To Canadian K-12 Education

Marshall McLuhan’s theories significantly influenced Canadian K-12 education by shifting the pedagogical focus from rote memorization to critical media literacy. His impact includes:

• Media literacy leadership: McLuhan’s work laid the foundation for Ontario to become the first jurisdiction in North America to mandate media literacy in the English curriculum (1987). Educators adopted his laws of media to help students deconstruct advertisements and news.
• The medium as teacher: By arguing that the medium is the message, McLuhan encouraged schools to integrate film, television, and eventually computers into classrooms, recognizing that these formats shape how students think and process information.
• The global classroom: His global village concept predicted the interconnectedness of modern digital learning, encouraging Canadian schools to adopt collaborative, project-based models over traditional isolated learning.
• Student-centric learning: McLuhan advocated for discovery-based education, influencing shifts away from the industrial age factory model toward environments that foster pattern recognition and environmental awareness in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

 

Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline

Marshall McLuhan made major contributions to the global systems thinking discipline by teaching scholars to view media and technology as dynamic environments that shape entire societies. Rather than treating communication tools as neutral channels, he argued that each medium reorganizes human perception, social behavior, and cultural life. His well known claim that “the medium is the message” redirected attention toward underlying structures, interactions, and systemic effects, which are central concerns in systems thinking. McLuhan’s idea of the global village also anticipated a world connected through electronic media, where events in one place could immediately affect understanding and behavior elsewhere. This helped frame communication as a networked system with feedback loops and global interdependence. He further contributed by encouraging people to think in terms of patterns, reversals, and relationships, instead of simple linear causation. His interdisciplinary approach drawing on literature, history, anthropology, and communication studies, modelled the kind of cross-field analysis that systems thinking requires. McLuhan’s work influenced later fields such as media ecology, network theory, and cultural analysis, making him an important figure in the global development of systems-oriented thought.

 

Individual Learning & Projects

 

Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking community taking shape.

This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.

The Projects of these pioneers could include teaching undergraduate university students, teaching and conducting research with graduate/post-graduate university students, or conducting research in learning institutes/foundations. Projects for some of them involved constructing an information sharing network enabling the interdisciplinary communication to occur, or working in diverse business, government and non-government organisations outside academia. Some pioneers chose to work as much as possible outside organised academia and conducted socioculturally impacting projects as independent scholars.

Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.

The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.

 

Learner Activities

With whom did Marshall engage more frequently in the Systems Thinking community?

Edmund Carpenter, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Boulding

 With whom did Marshall engage more frequently in his discipline? 

Neil Postman, Quentin Fiore, Harold Innis, Barrington Nevitt, Eric McLuhan

 With whom did Marshall engage more frequently from other disciplines? 

Edward T. Hall, Harley Parker, Étienne Gilson,  Teilhard de Chardin

 What role did Marshall’s spouse play in his engagements?

Corinne McLuhan (nee Keller Lewis) was a key editorial, intellectual, and practical collaborator in his engagements. Marshall was a notoriously chaotic writer who preferred to dictate his thoughts aloud rather than sit down and type. In the early and middle stages of his career, Corinne frequently typed, corrected, organized, and edited his manuscripts, helping transform his stream-of-consciousness ideas into coherent prose. She often acted as a protective buffer between Marshall and aggressive media outlets, demanding academics, or corporate executives who wanted to engage with him. Corrine was the master host for the Monday open-house salons at the McLuhan home in Toronto that was legendary for its gatherings where intellectuals, artists, foreign dignitaries, journalists, and students congregated. Marshall was absent-minded and notoriously uninterested in mundane life details (finances, domestic maintenance, schedules). Corinne took full responsibility for running the household, allowing Marshall the freedom to engage in his professional activities. Her role became especially important when he was overwhelmed with mail and later in poor health.

 

Projects

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951)

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

 

 

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