Marshall McLuhan Media theorist

On my recent walk through Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, I came across the grave of one of Canada’s greatest thinkers—philosopher and media theorist, Dr. H. Marshall McLuhan.

Born in Edmonton and raised in Winnipeg, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba before earning advanced degrees at Cambridge. After teaching in the U.S. for several years, he was called to the University of Toronto in 1946—where he would remain for the rest of his life, becoming a globally recognized intellectual force.

Few academics have infiltrated the collective psyche, intellectual realm and pop culture like McLuhan, who worked at U of T for more than 30 years.

Raised in a devout Protestant household—his mother a Baptist schoolteacher, his father a Methodist—McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937. His faith would remain central to his thinking and public life, influencing his participation in Catholic intellectual and cultural discourse for decades.

McLuhan was best known for coining phrases like:

• “The medium is the message”

• “The global village”

And remarkably, he predicted the Internet—or something very close to it—almost three decades before the World Wide Web was created.

1964

One quote of his that struck me, particularly in light of the COVID pandemic and the eerie silence of empty arenas and theatres, is this:

“A baseball game or any sport for that matter, without an audience would be a rehearsal only, a practice. The game requires a public, and the public has to resemble a whole cross-section of the community. Without an audience, these games would have no meaning at all.”

A prescient observation—spoken over 50 years ago—yet deeply relevant to the modern world.

McLuhan’s influence reached beyond academia. In Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, he famously makes a cameo as himself, shutting down a self-important intellectual with the line:

“You know nothing of my work.”

Marshall McLuhan died in Toronto on December 31, 1980, at the age of 69. He is buried beside his wife, Corinne, at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery.

1911-1980