Are there any connections between The Shining and Marshall McLuhan?
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian professor of English Literature who wrote a series of books examining the effect of communication technologies on the human psyche as well as on culture. McLuhan believed that media created new environments which in turn impacted on human behaviour in profound but largely unacknowledged ways. He is perhaps most famous today for coining the phrases “The medium is the message” and “Global Village.” McLuhan’s definition of media was broad, it was any technology that extended human physical and sensory capability: the wheel was an extension of the foot, clothes of the skin, weapons of teeth, books of the eye, radio of the ear, the computer of the brain, etc. He was especially interested in how technologies differed from one another and the way in which they amplified, integrated or isolated different senses (creating different sensibilities). McLuhan viewed history in terms of the effects on humankind of the invention of the phonetic alphabet, followed by th
