The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan. I Playboy. 1969.

 
A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media

From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”, Playboy Magazine, March 1969. © Playboy

In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto — and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books — The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) — and the graying professor from Canada’s western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the hottest academic property around.” He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant — and frequently baffling — theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.

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Theory