Marshall McLuhan was a media prophet. A tad mad perhaps, but defiantly influential. Born in Edmonton in 1911, he attended the University of Manitoba, achieving is Masters Degree, then finishing his PhD at Cambridge, in England. 

Upon finishing school, McLuhan bounced around Canada and the US, teaching and researching at various schools, such as Wisconsin, Forth Worth and St. Louis before settling at the University of Toronto. Here, his “mosaic” style of writing was given some focus with the help of Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, and publisher Jerome Agel. In these books, Marshall McLuhan went through the process of describing the physiological changes within mankind due to the information revolution and the new age of mass media. McLuhan overriding ambition was that he wanted to be recognized, for is work, or his genius, or his spectacular skills as an orator. He wanted to be understood, but failing that, he recognized the use of the media and became one of the first pop-professors. 

The title of his best-selling book The Medium is the Massage was rejected by academics when released. A lover of word-play, Mass-age is purposely spelt wrong, perhaps indicating the new “mass-age”, perhaps not. In any case the underlying concept is that the message is greatly impacted by the delivery system. Massage’s basic, yet hidden concept is the idea of a hot and cold medium. Hot being low-interaction, high definition, (like the new Web or TV) and cold being high-interaction, low definition – such as books. Television is a hot medium, thus the actors have to remain cool to make them seem convincing. Radio is a cooler medium – people are attracted to loud, hot under the collar sounds.  This analogy is, however, fundamentally wrong - it would take far beyond the presentation time I have here to explain it, and I don’t think I can do it, anyway. Upon publication “Massage” was seen as a maverick work, lacking in any traditional thought, and was quickly dismissed by the academic community.

Marshall set up his own community. In 1963, McLuhan was given his own wing of the U of  T – A center for Culture and Technology in 1973. By this point, his book was a run away success, and McLuhan was in demand.  Beside the standard college professor jobs, he freelanced with Trudeau on how to be media-savvy. Since McLuhan himself was media-savvy, he promoted himself in popular media, appearing on “Laugh-in”, showing up in a Woody Allen movie, and engaging in countless interviews, including Playboy interview in March 1969. The only problem was that very few people really understood what he was talking about.

“the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing.” – Page 8 – Medium is the Massage

Marshal coined “global village” and nobody understood what he meant. In 1954 he coined the phrase “Austic space” meaning a non-existent place where technology amplifies selected pieces of our culture, while it makes previously known material obsolete, retrieves elements previously obsolesced and eventually reverses or "flips" into something else entirely.  

Marshall’s books read as sound bites within a graphic heavy environment, to push his theory of society’s inevitable transformation of communication to a hotter and hotter medium based in an unknown, but probably electronic, medium. Keeping in mind, this is all between 1954 and 1963.

The end of his life was unfortunate. The U of T became impatient waiting for his theory to develop further, and while television was increasing in its role in society, in the 1970’s it still wasn’t taken very seriously. The prophesied “austic space” didn’t appear quickly enough, and the U of T canceled all funding for the Cultural and technology in 1978. 
Wired Magazine summed up the problem well ,”Everyone thought McLuhan was talking about TV, but what he was really talking about was the Internet -- two decades before it appeared. This book [The Medium is the Massage] makes McLuhan's strange ideas seem perfectly obvious in light of the web, email and cyberspace.”

At the age of 69, Marshal McLuhan suffered a stroke and died on the edge of the information era. Two years later the Personal computer was Time magazine’s Man of the Year. 

McLuhan has been adopted as the patron saint of Wired, magazine of the electronic age. He credited TV with breaking up the linearity of human lives and thinking, a linearity that had evolved from print culture, from centuries of words set in type set in lines set in pages that followed one another in invariable numerical order. 

McLuhan's main thesis, articulated most completely in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) is the medium is the message, i.e., the technology of communication (not the content) governs the nature of human communication, and thereby human affairs.

Even McLuhan's most cogent books are wayward and unkempt -- loose, shaggy buffaloes. They lurch from one subject to another, luminous moments alternating with piercingly dull digressions. The main points get endless iteration:
 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02edmundt.html

http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/mm2.html
http://www.well.com/~mmcadams/mcluhan.html
http://www.infosoc.co.uk/reviews/00107br2.htm
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/media212/pb.htm
http://www.routledge.com/feature/current/digital.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//1.03/streetcred.html?pg=12&person=marshall_mcluhan&topic_set=wiredpeople
Marchand, Phillip (1989). Marshall McLuhan : The Medium and the Messenger Toronto: Ticknor & Fields;
McLuhan, Marshall, et al. (1967) The Medium is the Massage City : Gingko Press Inc.;
Hot media extend a single sense in high definition (completeness); it is rich in specific information and leaves little to be filled in by the audience. Phonetic alphabet, paper, photograph, movies, print. 
Cool media are low definition (incomplete) in terns if information. They compel the audience to participate, to fill in the missing information in order to achieve resolution. Ideograms, stone, cartoon, television, telephone, colloquial speech.
McLuhan Works of Note
The Mechanical Bride (1951) 
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) 
Understanding Media (1964) 
The Medium is the Message (1967) 
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) 
Culture is our Business (1970)