Great care and attention were paid to the media consumption habits of Andrew McLuhan and his sisters Emily and Anna during their childhoods.

Until a sufficient amount of reading was completed each day, the television cabinet door would remain locked.

What motivated these specific technology rules for the McLuhan children? The answer lies in their family name, intimately connected with the study of media and its influence.

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Yes, Andrew is the grandson of the late, renowned Catholic Canadian philosopher and media studies pioneer Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), the man who famously declared “the medium is the message.”

In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall argued that the way information reaches you — whether through television or print, and now the Internet — changes you more than the information itself.

The man dubbed “the father of modern media studies” used the light bulb to animate his hypothesis. A light bulb is devoid of content — no pictures, words or story — but it is transformative: it turns night into day, lets people work late, changes the aesthetic of cities (streetlights, nightlife), alters sleep patterns and reshapes social life.

Marshall’s acute awareness about the developmental effects of media passed down to his son Eric McLuhan (1942-2018), who became a communications theorist in adulthood and co-wrote with his father on multiple occasions. Eric then passed these convictions on to the next generation.

“What my father understood and what my grandfather understood was that the technologies we use shape us on a very fundamental level, a sensory level, and this shapes who we are,” said Andrew. “Especially at a young age, this matters most when we're really becoming who we will be for the rest of our lives in a certain way.

“If we care about our children and our culture, and the future of both, we need to be paying a lot more attention to this.” 

Andrew, 47, was only two years old when his grandfather passed away in his sleep on Dec. 31, 1980. Fifteen months beforehand, in September 1979, he suffered a severe stroke that left him with permanent aphasia.

“His stroke left him unable to say words any more,” recalled Andrew. “But he could make noises, and I could make noises. Apparently, we had little babbling conversations with each other.”

Eventually, he came to discover many people knew of his grandfather and his most famous theory. He decided to look into “the medium is the message” himself as a kid, and he found it quite confusing. A few years later, he tried again, and it did not make much more sense.

As an adult in his 30s, eureka. What strikes him about the thesis is how much is expressed in a short, simple phrase.

“There are layers of meanings, and it's five words, really two words, medium and message,” said Andrew. “Yet there's paradox, play, enlightenment and tension all within it. A friend of mine compared it to E=mc² in that it's a formula for culture and technology in the same way that was a formula for physics.”

At age 30, Andrew began a nine-year term as his father's part-time assistant. He would oversee travel and logistics, coordinate communications, marketing and sales and complete other assigned tasks. The man who also lives by the maxim “I don’t explain, I explore” continued to learn as a student from his father.

Along with becoming more fluent in understanding Marshall and Eric’s theories, Andrew also gained a greater consciousness of how both men were enriched by their Catholic faith.

Marshall converted to Catholicism in 1937 at the age of 25 amid an intellectual and spiritual journey for truth. He was inspired by the writings of English Christian apologist, writer and Catholic convert G.K Chesterton, British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson and French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. It is widely acknowledged that his intellectual framework was rooted in his Catholic beliefs.

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Andrew said there is a marked difference in Marshall’s work before and after the conversion. Beforehand, “he tended to be a lot more judgmental,” and what “he discovered in Catholicism is that it's not up to him to judge,” and that shift enriched his work.

“Once you decide whether something is good or bad, you really give up a lot of your objectivity in evaluating the thing in its own terms,” said Andrew. “It's not that he didn't have private opinions about whether things were good or bad, evil or holy, but that he learned to hold these things lightly when trying to understand.”

Regarding his father’s connection to his faith, Andrew shared how St. Therese of Lisieux loomed in Eric’s life as an inspirational figure. He was stirred by her call for believers to do small, everyday things with immense love and humility to become holy, and he was comforted by the presence of roses, the signature sign of “The Little Flower’s” intercession.

Andrew noted in an online blog that the last two universities Eric lectured at before his death on May 17, 2018 — St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon and La Universidad de la Sabana, just outside of Bogotá, Colombia — were graced with many roses.

“It is a comfort to his family that Eric died while in the bosom of his faith; practising it with his characteristic devotion, feeling its real presence around him,” wrote Andrew on June 3, 2018.

In 2017, a year before Eric’s death, Andrew founded the McLuhan Institute to honour the legacy of his forebearers and to continue their work in exploring and understanding culture and technology. He delivers lectures at universities, and he guides workshops — using McLuhan methods — to help individuals and groups gain fresh perspectives about the personal and social consequences of technology.

While leading a five-year immersive study of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Andrew and his students reviewed a George Herbert poem included in the book called “Prayer (I).” The English poet compared prayer to “reverse thunder,” us speaking upward to God, an inverse of God speaking to His people on Earth through thunder and lightning.

“Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.”

Not only did the poem strike a potent chord with Andrew because he is a poet in his own right, but it also sparked a concept of “prayer as technology.”

“This notion of prayer as a mode of communication I found fascinating,” said Andrew. “It is a technology to connect with the divine. This seemed to me a very interesting thing to think about, and I haven't really stopped thinking about it since.”

He elaborated that language, including prayer, is technology because, at its essence, it is a means to accomplish something differently beyond our natural means.

Andrew has said on multiple occasions, “I was born into my family’s faith and into my family’s religion.” During his formative years, he briefly contemplated the priesthood. He became disinterested spiritually during his teenage years.

“I think in the same way that a certain amount of experience and maturity allowed the intellectual spark to reach me, perhaps the same can be said for the spiritual spark,” said Andrew. “I consider myself a student in both areas — it's something I wrestle with.

“It's maybe more difficult because I was born into it. My grandfather was not. He was Protestant and came to the Church on his knees, as you like to say. My father, the most religious person who wasn't a priest or nun that I've ever known, found solace in it all his days. But it's been more of a struggle for me. I don't know where the end is in that. It's an ongoing journey.”

One of the next steps along his journey is contemplating the “prayer as technology” theme further in an essay to come in the months ahead. And he, like many people of faith, is being called to consider how to practise faith in a world increasingly driven by artificial intelligence.

“The medium is the message” is getting a renewed burst of attention in recent years because of the new Large Language Models (LLM) frontier. While much time and effort will be required to better grasp the message of artificial intelligence, Andrew said it has already “taken up a firm position in our lives, and we’re past the tipping point.” He suggested that each individual needs to consider if uses of the technology uphold their values or not. An enthusiast for language, he does not plan on spending a lot of time on these platforms.

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“I do know that my love of words comes from the mysterious thing that happens when they come to me in my mind, and then through my voice or my hand in my pen or pencil,” said Andrew. “I've spent a long time, a lot of effort developing abilities in those areas. I understand if I want to keep them, I've got to keep at them. So, I don't think I'll be using LLMs very deeply any time soon.”

In other words, he’s locking his own “cabinets” now for his own good.