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Articles

Marshall McLuhan on the Mobile Phone

Peter Benson sees a prophet’s message come to fulfilment through net and cell.

“Is it not absurd for men to live involuntarily altered in their inmost lives by some mere technological extension of our inner senses?”
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, (1962), p.183

Marshall McLuhan never owned a mobile phone. He died in 1980, before such gadgets became widely available. Yet the theories he developed about the effect of communications media on the human psyche can be applied to recent technologies which he could have known nothing about. In fact, in the age of the Internet and the mobile phone, many people are beginning to read McLuhan with renewed interest.

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