Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work

Found while browsing through McLuhan's iconic texts. A playful introduction by an author I really enjoy. Douglas Coupland is the David Foster Wallace of Canada.

Bibliographic Deets
Coupland, Douglas 2010. You Know Nothing of My Work. Penguin, Canada.

Content
It doesn't seem fitting to reproduce Coupland's editorializing/commenting on McLuhan's life, as unlike academic works, its not simply a point made that can be easily re-packaged and freely re-used for your own work. It's a story after all. So this is mostly serving to render a working biography of McLuhan for personal context.

McLuhan's Life (Overview)

 * 1911 - Born
 * 1929 - Enters Liberal Arts program at U of Manitoba (B.A.)
 * 1936 - Second B.A. from Cambridge (Trinity Hall)
 * 1937 - Becomes Catholic - Starts teaching at Catholic St. Louis University (Missouri)
 * 1939 - Gets married. Goes back to Cambridge to prep doctorate on Thomas Nashe
 * 1946 - Starts teaching at U of Toronto
 * 1951 - Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man is published
 * 1962 - The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is published.
 * 1963 - Founds Centre for Culture and Technologoy
 * 1964 - Understanding Media published
 * 1967 - McLuhan @ Fordham - Publishes The Medium is the Massage
 * 1969 - Counterblast (2) is published
 * 1979 - Severe stroke. Becomes speechless.
 * 1980 - Dead on Dec. 31
 * From pages (215 - 216)

Best of McLuhan

 * "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns."


 * "Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception."


 * "Art is anything you can get away with"


 * "When information is brushed up against information, the results are startling and effective"


 * "We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us"


 * "Mass transportation is doomed to fail in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think"


 * "Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century"


 * "The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because his image will be so much more powerful than he will ever be."


 * "The user is the content" -> PREDICTS SOCIAL MEDIA