Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar. He taught English literature, literary critic, and made great contributions to communication theory. He is considered one of the founders of media studies, and is also classified as one of the great visionaries of the world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he established the term global village to delineate the human interconnection on a global scale formulated by electronic means of communication.
Thanks to his doctorate from the University of Cambridge (1943) he focuses his reasoning on the history of the verbal arts. McLuhan repeatedly uses the Latin concept of trivium to highlight a systematic order of the worldview of some periods in the history of Western culture. He created many notions that today are used as the Gutenberg Galaxy, the Global Village, the difference between hot and cold media and the delineation of the media as parts of the human being.
McLuhan’s media outlook is known as technological determinism. When he passed away, cable television was not yet massiveEven those who made up the global village were unaware of interactivity, electronic books, multimedia, etc., however, their legacy gives us a theoretical framework that helps us understand the new media that today are known to our civilization.
In the exordium to The Gutemberg Galaxy, affirms that the word environment would have been better to describe the period; however, he then asserts that the term galaxy is perfectly delineating the set of mutual correspondence of the different factors that have no connection to each other.
He also stated that the cycle between media-messages and the man-user, ends in today’s call Marconi Galaxy, which is typical of the television medium. Then determine the Hot and cold media emerge from technical meanings, which are demonstrated with the experience of the senses rather than with the meaning of words.
When he talks about information that a medium transmits, he does not refer to data or knowledge, but to the way in which we physically respond to a medium or are part of it. Determining that hot media are high definition, while cold is the opposite.
They would therefore be hot media: radio, printing, photographs, conferences; Y cold media: the telephone, speech, television, seminars, among others.