Introduction
It has been over thirty years since Marshall McLuhan first gained notoriety for his remark, "The medium is the message" (McLuhan, 1997, p.7). He predicted a world that is a lot smaller than the world in his day. He never lived to see his prediction come. Today we are much closer to his prediction of a global village. In many cases the predictions or theories of the past are discarded since they no longer fit the framework within which society is living. The world is no longer flat, nor is it the centre of the universe. Does the same hold true for the work of Marshall McLuhan? His work has always been controversial for its theoretical basis with no foundation in actual proof (Mackenzie, 1967). People have just started to consider and understand McLuhan's work nearly twenty years after his death. This paper is focussing on the work of Marshall McLuhan to determine whether his theories do hold true to today's world as McLuhan predicted.
This paper carries some baggage with its perspective. The focus on McLuhan is limited to the teachings in McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man text. To consider McLuhan's total life's work would be ludicrous in the frameworks of this paper due to the sheer volume of material that would have to be considered. Some of McLuhan's most familiar work has been selected as the framework for the examination in this paper. The concept of cyberculture will be used in order to demonstrate that some of McLuhan's theories can be adapted to today's culture. To investigate cyberculture in terms of Marshall McLuhan, it is first necessary to understand McLuhan's work on a deeper level in order to consider it once the discussion turns to that of cyberculture. The first section of this paper is dedicated to McLuhan's theories. The second section will examine cyberculture through the eyes of Marshall McLuhan.
