Marshall McLuhan

A devout Catholic and Cambridge-trained scholar of Elizabethan rhetoric, McLuhan directed the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), he argued that communication technologies fundamentally reshape human perception.

McLuhan became a global intellectual celebrity in the 1960s, sought by corporate leaders and artists from Andy Warhol to John Lennon. His revolutionary foresight that electronic interconnectedness would transform humanity into a unified 'global village' proved uncannily prophetic in the digital age.