Radio, audio – similarly enhances our hearing sense, and our brain is able to attach the corresponding pictures to the sounds. In McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (the book from which the famous quote comes), he talks about how different forms of media enhance our senses differently – how film enhances our sense of vision, and that due to that enhancement we don’t have to work very hard to make up the rest. Today, they are banging louder than ever. Seth Godin talks of building Tribes around things that we are passionate about, and that those tribes will spin off other tribes, and that’s how people change the world. When electronic media came along, the tribal drums started banging and we never looked back. TV and radio were the birth of one-to-many communication. He talks of us “banging the tribal drum” and how these new media (which at that time consisted of radio and TV) enabled us to have a voice and share our messages to wide audiences. McLuhan brings up the concept of Tribes early on. I had to remind myself that piece was filmed in 1964. Interesting, eh? Did you think you were listening to someone from the 21st century speak? I did, the first time. Watch the video below, it’s 8 minutes of vintage CBC gold, and listen carefully to what McLuhan says. I think he would have been amazed, and probably would have done a fair bit of “I told you so”, too. I often wonder how McLuhan, who died in 1980, would have reacted to the Internet and new media. He pioneered new ways of thinking about how we communicate. I’ve studied McLuhan for about as long as I’ve been involved in media and communications, and if you’re a media maker and communicator, you need to study him too.

You may know McLuhan best for his famous quote “The medium is the message”.

I came across a great article on Brain the other day, featuring the Canadian icon of media thought, Marshall McLuhan.

Marshall mcluhan and the internet