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Sleight of Mind: How Marshall McLuhan 'Read the Contemporary World.'

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“We need new perceptions to cope. Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future. That is my technique.” ‘Encounter’ Magazine, 1967 He was adamant that he didn’t predict, but described what he sensed around him in the present. This, he said, was the unique gift of the artist. That they experience and express what is happening in the present and if it looks fantastic and foreign to us it’s because we’re stuck in the past or just that slow to catch on. “The future is now. The teacher of the future is always the present, and it is very difficult to look at the present. Everything that is going to happen in 10 or 20 years is happening now, right under our noses.” ‘Education in the Electronic Age,’ 1967 speech We are the sum of our senses. It is the artist and the young, senses open and raw, who experience things first. The generation gap is not one of

Sleight of Mind: How Marshall McLuhan 'Read the Contemporary World.' Often called a ‘prophet’ or a ‘guru,’ McLuhan was no magician—he was methodical. He insisted “I am always careful to only predict things which have already happened.' Here's how he did it. Andrew McLuhan Mar 13, 2024 38 1 9 Share Author photo from 3rd edition, cover of 1st edition. ‘He wasn’t ahead of his time, he was ahead of his contemporaries’, my dad said to me. “We need new perceptions to cope. Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a

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