https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.31.4.314 - Sunday, December 11, 2022 8:50:09 AM - IP Address:54.221.12.219
4.1 Marshall McLuhan: Media Ecologist and Educator Nadia Delicata, Faculty of Theology, University of Malta
The wired planet has no boundaries and no monopolies of knowledge. The affairs of the world are now dependent upon the highest information of which man is capable. . . . The boundaries between the world of affairs and the community of learning have ceased to exist. The workaday world now demands encyclopedic wisdom (McLuhan, Forward 172).
Thirty-two years after his death, Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) still holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His first doctoral student, Donald F. Theall, described him in the epic formula: “guru cum prophet cum philosopher cum promoter cum popularizer cum pseudo-artist Marshall McLuhan” (Theall 25). More recently, the geek magazine Wired has crowned him as its “patron saint”. Still, as “prophet” of the digital age and popular icon, McLuhan has attracted much misconception and even disdain. Academia has blatantly misunderstood him and even disparaged his work calling him a media determinist, a technophobe and paradoxically, even a technophile (Willmott xii). Popular culture might have adulated him in the sixties, but just as easily forgot him a decade later—to be remembered, of course, when the world caught up with him and his so-called “prophecies” became “real” in the Internet age (Cavell xvi-xvii; Ward). Hence, interpretations of McLuhan’s work and his public role have notoriously been tainted by animated polemic, even if the importance of his contribution remains largely unappreciated and even unknown. In this article, I would like to present Marshall McLuhan and his oeuvre in the role that he himself assumed: of educator in the tradition of Ciceronian humanism (Chrystall abstract). Not only was McLuhan a literature professor trained by his mentors at Cambridge University in New Criticism (McLuhan, Interior xiii-xiv), but in immersing himself in classical learning for his doctoral research, he became somewhat of an anomaly, translating the ancient skills of “exegesis” to the milieu of contemporary culture. Thus he became founding father of a contemporary humanistic tradition of learning: “media ecology” (Strate 1). As conceived by McLuhan, the study of media effects that create an ecology (hence “media ecology”) retrieves the centrality of logos in the Greco-Roman and medieval
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