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Food for Thought

Remembering Marshall McLuhan

Tim Madigan meditates on the man behind the message.

“It’s inevitable that the whirlpool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens… we can get through.” – Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

I teach at St John Fisher College in upstate New York. A few years ago Diane Lucas, then the campus archivist, mentioned to me in passing that Marshall McLuhan’s daughter Stephanie had been doing research in our archives on her father’s work. Marshall McLuhan?! I was astonished to hear that name mentioned, as it had been years since I’d thought about the communications guru who had coined the phrases ‘the Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’. But more to the point, what possible connection did he have with St John Fisher College? To my astonishment, Diane told me that McLuhan had been a faculty member at St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, which was founded by the Congregation of St Basil, the order which also founded St John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, in 1949.

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