McLuhan, Marshall

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Very good book. Almost prophetic.
My view of the world ...
Where are the Audio and Video Versions?
Wisdom from the Prophet of the Internet
To Digital or Not to Digital; Was That The Question? Chocolate/Vanilla, Either/Or Options?

The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan , and Quentin Fiore
Manufacturer: Gingko Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
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ASIN: 1584230703

Amazon.com

The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

Book Description

30 years after its publication Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage remains his most entertaining, provocative, and piquant book. With every technological and social "advance" McLuhan's proclamation that "the media work us over completely" becomes more evident and plain. In his words, 'so pervasive are they in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, or unaltered'.

McLuhan's remarkable observation that "societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" is undoubtedly more relevant today than ever before. With the rise of the internet and the explosion of the digital revolution there has never been a better time to revisit Marshall McLuhan.

Customer Reviews:

Very good book. Almost prophetic........2007-05-16

Some of McLuhans stuff is really unaccessible for average readers... It's deep stuff... BUT we see much of what he was talking about occuring in our modern day. It's really interesting. I think if he could have found a better way to present his philosphies he could have really made much more of a difference to our "global community"

My view of the world ..........2006-12-16

... was profoundly influenced by this book. I read it about 30 years ago. I'm pleasantly surprised to find it still in print.

Where are the Audio and Video Versions?.......2006-10-21

Yes, back in the late 60's or early 70's there were both audio and a movie version of this title. I use to own the LP album and frequently watched the short movie version that played on college campuses more than 35 years ago. Hopefully, the LP and movie will eventually be transferred to CD and DVD? Better yet: podcast? clyde

Wisdom from the Prophet of the Internet.......2006-06-20

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) never conceived of the Internet. But the great communications theorist understood where communications was going, and the revolutionary effects of its direction.

This book takes his sometimes impenetrable prose and places it in a context of compelling photographs, advertisements, and cartoons in order to dramatically illustrate the meaning of his words, and the radical effect that changes in communications technology have on the lives of all the world's citizens. "It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of the media," he writes.

The Medium is the Massage begins and ends with quotes from Albert North Whitehead. The first is that "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." The last is that "It is the business of the future to be dangerous."

There always are jeremiads against the new by those who are accustomed to the old. McLuhan quotes Socrates: "The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."

The effects of the media on individuals are profound. "All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pyschological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical."

Media affect you, the individual citizen. "Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank--that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes.' We have already reached a point where remedial control, born of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted...."

Media affect your family. "The family circle has widened. The whirlpool of information fathered by the electic media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage."

Media affect your neighborhood. "Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstitued dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the the new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place.' You can't GO home again."

Media affect your education. "Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute 'adult' news--inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties--and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines."

Media affect your job. "From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute 'mechanization' and 'specialism.' These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time. Under conditions of electric cicuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and 'human' service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty."

Media affect your government. "Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an envrionment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the 'public') can be used as a creative, participating force. It is instead merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. A new form of 'politics' is emerging, and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing EVERYTHING."

Media affect our relationships with groups of other citizens. "The shock of recognition. In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained, ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."

This book is, in short, a superb introduction to McLuhan's thinking. Ideally, it would be read before any of McLuhan's other books. Understanding McLuhan takes some time and thought, but the effort is well worth it to understand today's media and today's world.

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing," McLuhan quotes Meister Eckhardt as saying. McLuhan erases preconceptions of media being relatively insignificant, and demonstrates how the media affect the way each of us sees the world in which we live.

A memorable photo in the book is one of a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase standing upon a surfboard, riding the waves. "In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe's mariner in 'The Descent Into the Maelstrom' staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool," says McLuhan's accompanying prose. "His insight offers a possible strategem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl."

The last cartoon in the book--from the New Yorker in 1966--summarizes McLuhan's essential theme. A young man with a guitar discusses McLuhan with his father in a well-appointed library. "You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the enviroment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?"

We all should get McLuhan. The development of Internet--likely even more transformative than television--has greatly revived interest in McLuhan's view of technological changes as changing us as people, and of creating a global village for all of us to live in. "We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on," McLuhan warns. We should heed his warnings and recognize, embrace, and work for constructive improvements in the ever-changing world in which we live.

To Digital or Not to Digital; Was That The Question? Chocolate/Vanilla, Either/Or Options?.......2005-12-05

Do printed Words create a sick society of antisocial eggheads with their noses hovering habitually above pages of ink? Duh, what? He said what when?

Here are a few of the words McLuhan used to politely and perceptively express this concept and much more.

>> Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.... The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media. Anxiety is, in great part, a result of trying to do do today's jobs with yesterday's tools, with yesterday's concepts. <<

Of course, the above quoted passage makes more sense today; imagine the awesome brain blower it would have been to a regular Jane or Joe reading it in 1967.

Possibly the only concept McLuhan hadn't yet tasted on his perceptive palate, was the idea that we could choose both chocolate AND vanilla, as we now do.

On other words, what is Amazon.com?

Possibly one of the best examples of a chocolate/vanilla marbled merger (what IS it with all these "M"'s) is the existence, style, and success of Amazon.com, where a graphically-enriched, ethereal electronic medium sells BOOKS... which have WORDS in them, on printed pages! Oh my, (dear McLuhan) we (humans) still like to bow out of the global, communal bombardment and READ in isolated luxury, in addition to enjoying the social, "interconnected" facets of electronic ease (sometimes coming through as sleazy cheese, and now we have Velveeta, too).

The 60's were truly gooey with phobias of solitude. Wonder what THAT was all about?

When composing my review of Jill Churchill's FEAR OF FLYING (posted 11/24/05, on Thanksgiving morning, with 2 other gourmet, sizzled turkey offerings), I was Right-Brain kicked into mentioning McLuhan's Massage, which hadn't crossed my mind in ages. In the FoF review, due to the Right Brain being basically non-verbal, my syntax around McLuhan's hallmark, landmark book tied itself into a Freudian slip-knot which I was forced to untie with a postscript:

P.S. Marshall McLuhan wrote THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE (implying more than "message"). I visited the Amazon buying page for that book to check spelling of his name. The editorials and 15 customer reviews there were amazingly insightful as well as delightfully (and crisply) worded. Even the slight criticisms felt clean, clear, and honestly helpful. Without reservation, I voted "Yes" on each of the reviews. They told me more about the book than I "got" when I read it in college (umpteen Ages ago) and they returned to memory and life what I did get. Born in 1947, I'm in the Baby Boomer crowd. (Maybe I should go post this P.S. into a review?)

(End of P.S. added to my review of Jill Churchill's FoF.)

In the last half of the 60's, my soul was still asleep and my body was off base with the hormones of youth (no OUT-of-the-body's personal repertoire of drugs were intended, needed, or used). In this condition, my mind was somewhat in a state of "Duh, Maynard" when I read McLuhan's Massage picture book. The reading was done as a university class requirement, along with Joseph Wood Krutch's desert book (Alvin Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK came a bit later), and a few other offerings of that type of mind-blowing, nearly hallucinogenic publication which seemed to come out in waves in that cultural push-&-shove period. I didn't/don't use drugs, but for all practical purposes some of the "Hey, DUUUUDE" peer-poking effects were "totally" unavoidable. (Admired the uniqueness of the review written with Hippie slang syntax.)

The fascinating thing (a la Spock) is, though, that a surge of shocking, sometimes brilliant conceptualization was being published then. While some of it exposed prolific, prophetic genius, some appeared to be a result of fried brain cells flashing toxins on their way to being an ash.

Was that time-frame also when shock treatment was initiated as a cure for depression, to give the brain a cellular-zapped clue that life was supposed to be a bed-of-roses, not a pain-in-the-patootie? What irony.

And, were heart-shocker paddles originally put out then to keep a soul trapped in a body when it was attempting a back door exit? What horror.

When will Pet Sematary reach its age of prophesy undone (my review 10/16/05). Okay, I'm drawing an extreme here. Electrically convincing the heart to begin-again beating when it had hiccuped and halted doesn't always return an unwilling soul to an almost cold, warn out body. Sometimes that medical miracle extends life as a very good thing for all concerned. And, how would I know whether shocking a heart back to beating is good or bad? I don't know.

However, for me, Stephen King's Pet Sematary makes a good point to ponder.

When is Death doing us a favor?

I'm going to have to reread (or would that be "redo") McLuhan's book from my current state of having worked a Quantum particle beyond "huh?" The reviews here on TMITM have peaked my curiosity for a return visit, though my taste for culinary mystery novels will probably take the cake and be the frosting on it as I read it, too, for a while yet.

What I got from The Medium then was, "Big things are happening, babe; better watch out! The Future is going to be lightning electrified. Not only is God dead; words are out."

I don't recall much Left Brain stuff from that time-frame, but I may have hoped that mass electrocution wouldn't be the Last Hurrah of Our Species." Looking back, it seemed then that some of the intellectual eggs were trying to scramble the Right Brain into the Left, using words so full of "meaning" they had leaped the gap of comprehension.

I love electronic mediums and the messages I'm able to send and receive through ozonic ether. And, I still love the grounded pleasure of reading a good book. A delightful, carnival-marriage of the best of both worlds is "Now Playing" on Amazon.

Strange how the future sometimes creates the whole (ball of wax, basket of eggs, whatever) as more than the sum of its pasts; and the future continues to arrive in spite of the best published intentions of Chicken-Little twinges, as enlightening and insightful though the small, salmonella-slinging-species may be.

This is not to say that any of the books I've mentioned are examples of Chicken Little syndromes. They are not. They are gems to be treasured in their prophetic intensity of down sides, which come to pass, somewhat, in uncanny manifestations of words made flesh, even as the future continues to save itself as it comes to pass by the present in one grand leap of time.

I'm not sure, but I may have just channeled a message from Confucius (or maybe Buddha), still receiving...

Who is (are?) the Author(s?) of The (actual) Laws of Physics?

Who designed this reality so precisely that we're allowed to make the messes we're in and still somehow grow out of them (to varying degrees, rather than to the Nth)?

Or... How many times have we started over?

All I know is I love books, and cozy escape fiction is my cup of vanilla-bean tea. As a chocaholic, I also love DVD's. All these mediums titillate my brain and (sometimes) make my soul glad it's agreed to this tour in a body glued to a planet by gravity.

Thanks, Amazon, for allowing us to be here and spout. A Fountainhead (see my review 10/15/05) I'm not, but my mouth often runs off without me...

I'm still wondering what McLuhan had against paper and ink.

I understand that he would have been disgusted with peoples' fears of electric and electronic progress, since he clearly saw the beauty of potential and sheer release of creativity in that mind-enhancing evolution. And, I'm beyond thankful for his contribution to holding gateways open for that evolution.

Even understanding McLuhan's obvious need to fight fears of progress, I feel there's more to ferret about his deal against paper/ink technology.

Certainly he would have been impatient with being forced to communicate that way, since his brain consistently made sonic booms beyond the speed of his typewriter clicks.

Yeah, and how hard would it have been for ancient scribes painstakingly etching records of existence with scratchy pen tip & sloppy ink bottle?

Likely, McLuhan was incensed with the lost time it took to communicate his brain farts & sparks, when he wanted to be OUT side playing in a (symbolic) sandbox with his friends. This man clearly had Sagittarius, Jupiter, and/or the 11th House in play at his time, place, day and year of birth. He was probably born right after a fresh New Moon had made its debut, maybe even right after the peak of a Solar Eclipse. He had more to say than several lifetimes would allow him to express. Who wouldn't be impatient with the slowness and lack of "out-of-the-house" drama of working on a typewriter or even one of the types of electronic mechanisms available in the early 60's (actually he probably began that surge-to-scribe-and-communicate process in the 50's or earlier).

I remember well how I felt when I realized (in 1986, when I was typing a 500 page ms for the first on an 8000 IBM Clone PC w/out a hard drive) that I didn't have to retype each and every page of 500 every time I needed a "clean copy" to work from. Oh man! I could do so much MORE in a given amount of time by chust (ironically, I'm reviewing Amish novels, too, see my Listmania's & reviews on Tamar Myers's PenDutch series and IN DUTCH AGAIN by Barbara Workinger) reprinting a page or so each time I needed to make a correction or edited improvement.

Unless you've composed, typed & re-typed, edited & revised several drafts of a 500 page ms, you might not be totally aware of this awesome feeling of relief to an intensely creative mind. Most book-length mss (manuscripts) done prior to PC & printer capacity, had to be retyped a few to several times, as revisions darkened the page with hand-scrawled changes, so much that the author was no longer able to see through the mess, and had to make a complete fresh copy of the whole work, with page-numbering-sequence corrected, which would often take even the best typist about a week of full-time-effort.

Oh yeah. I can see what caused McLuhan to develop such a putrid disgust of printed-word-technology, when I take time to empathize with the sheer drudgery of this tedious, mundane process to a mind surged with so much creativity it could design, in a few days, every detail of a new world in a strange universe (or "merely" explain the essence and fundamentals of our present world and its cultures).

Of course, given the level of minds we (as a species) have (and sometimes use) now, we might be able to design at Quantum Level a new world to be communicated within the pages of a novel (a book of printed words) or within a movie on DVD (yea, McLuhan we have THOSE goodies now!). We aren't quite yet at the level to design (then seed, activate or implement) whole physical universes with varieties of functioning sets of Laws of Physics to hold them together, from a massive core of gravity, and allow them to expand and contract, maybe even grow/evolve a few species of interacting critters on various world and galactic venues.

Or, would you like to be trapped in a physical world designed by our current state of mind? Oops. Maybe that's what's wrong with us? Still, there's a lot right with us, too. A species which created the novel isn't all bad (see my spotlighted review of THE NOVEL by James Michener).

In awe of a Consciousness so far beyond mine it actually created Time,

Linda G. Shelnutt

P.S. As a student English teacher in 1970, I was set up in a Denver suburb high school to teach a new class called "Filmic Statement." The class exposed a revolutionary concept of the Language of Film. Fresh out of college in 1970, still trailing tangents from graduate seminars in Language, Linguistics, History of Language, Semantics, etc., I didn't fully realize how much that high school class owed its existence to McLuhan. I can certainly identify with the English professor side of McLuhan. I'm still trying to recall through which course of study his Medium/Massage book was touted, English Lit or Sociology.

P.S.S. I see that the medium of communication says a lot more than many of us would have realized, without a mind like McLuhan's having burst its seams. But, I don't quite "buy" that the medium says more than its content. If so, why did I take days to compose this review, and why would you read it. You could just sit there and do a Right-Brain-"oohhhhmmmmm" to a blurry monitor screen without reading word one. Try that and see if you can comprehend what I've struggled to communicate. Words. Gotta love em. Syntax is sensual. And, as to the concept of Language, yes, we have to consider that it will probably grow well beyond these packages, eventually. I mean. After I pop out of this body for that Final Time, am I going to be forced to use words to express the experience? I ask you. Will I need a Notebook PC, on "the other side"? What link will I use then to get messages back to planet? Death is more than The Great Equalizer, and maybe it should be proud of its alternate set of Laws of Physics. Whew. What a release.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Average customer rating:

visionary, seriously.
A WORLD WITHOUT WALLS
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA-UNDERSTANDING MAN
From 1964, and Could've Been 2004
The first systematic articulation of McLuhan's thoughts

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Marshall McLuhan , and Lewis H. Lapham
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0262631598

Book Description

<B>with a new introduction by Lewis H. Lapham

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Customer Reviews:

visionary, seriously........2007-03-15

hard to get into this book at first, but it's staggering once you figure out how it wants to be read.

not hand holding, but poetry. not syntax, but musical phrase.

"the medium is the message" challenges the mind, but that's part of the point. willfully disorienting and ultimately successful if you spend enough time with it.

worth reading for anyone fascinated by the history and possibilities of the internet/telecom/etcetera.

A WORLD WITHOUT WALLS.......2006-12-01

With all the ink spilt over UNDERSTANDING MEDIA it is easy to forget that it is just a book full of printed words, one of the media McLuhan discussed. Wait one second, if the message, in itself, doesn't really matter, if the media is the message, what differentiated this book from any other? It was his literary style, his dichotomies, his analogies and his metaphors.

The fact is that inventing dichotomies is like asserting theories without any evidence. How can you prove the validity of a dichotomy? Couldn't these dichotomies become distortions, even an abuse of language? And although Marshall doesn't proclaim any morality involved by using his dichotomies, it is implicitly there.

McLuhan's linguistic technique was to use dichotomies such as media and message, such as hot and cold media, such as electric and pre-electric culture. He placed his dichotomies like stones across a river. Once the readers step off the shore they must keep stepping on these stones, these dichotomies, or go splash. There is no way to turn around.

The problem with McLuhan's message, with his vocabulary, with particularly his terms "extensions" and "media" is that he implied a rather ridiculous metaphor with them. His term, "extensions" depicted man being jerked by the unseen puppeteer, outside strings attached to the numb puppet to make him dance.

As he discussed at length in Chapter 21, The Press, McLuhan was very aware that he was spinning the words. He had a corporate image of his own to enhance, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, itself. He was his own press agent. Listen to him on P. 213,: "Today's press agent regard the newspaper as a ventriloquist does his dummy." McLuhan was both writing a book and advertising that book at the same time. He wasn't hung up on being accurate -- he knew the spinning power of fiction. On P. 216 he speaks of "dressing up language." It becomes obvious that he used all the techniques he discussed in advertising while writing this book.

His idea that man's brain was a blank tableau, a tabula rasa, set the reader up for his dichotomies that all media were extensions of man's brain or central nervous system, CNS. But is man's CNS a tabula rasa? One thinks not. The various media he listed are all part and parcel of man's CNS. It would have been more accurate to term McLuhan's so called "extensions" as dimensions. These "extensions" never actually existed outside McLuhan's thesis and vocabulary.

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA-UNDERSTANDING MAN.......2006-06-04

A VERY GOOD BOOK INDEED. A POWERFUL LITTLE THING. TAMP OUT YOUR JOINTS. CLEAR YOUR HEADS OF COCAINE. GET A GOOD OLD FIFTY YEAR OLD DICTIONARY AND SETTLE DOWN TO A GOOD READ...

From 1964, and Could've Been 2004.......2005-12-14

This book is over 40 years old, and yet it was so far ahead of its time in its examination of media forms and their impact on mankind that it could still be used as the text for a graduate course. Simply amazing. Not a simple, laymen's read; none of McLuhan's books ever were. Still, enormously rewarding for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of how inventions such as moveable type, television, and even the lightbulb have changed not only how we relate to one another but how we even define 'we' in the first place. "Understanding Media" will make you see yourself differently in the world that surrounds you. How many books can you say that about?

The first systematic articulation of McLuhan's thoughts.......2005-07-01

Marshall McLuhan's contributions to media theory are mostly dismissed in two phrases - the first one hardly his major contribution - namely: 'global village' and 'medium is the message'. And most people who manage to cite the second phrase as his contribution still miss out on his pun 'medium is the massage'.

In this book, Marshall McLuhan expands on the scattered ideas of his book 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' into a systematic theory of media. The book has two sections.

The first part details his theory of media. There are many fruitful ideas here worth a further study like:

1. Medium as at once the message (as it effects in spite of its content rather than because of it) and massage of senses.
2. Media as extensions of man (that is, any tool that mediates human action or thought rather than just communication media).
2. Hot media (which accentuate senses) and Cold media (which are synaesthetic).
3. Hybrid energy released by combination of media.

The second part details his interepretations of each medium in terms of his theory, and in accordance with his definition of media, covers things like cars, clothes etc., apart from television, radio, advertising etc.

Both McLuhan's general theory of media and his theoretical articulations of a particular medium provoke and inspire a new way of thinking about media, even if the reader might not agree with all his theorizations.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Average customer rating:

McLuhan's Most Difficult Book
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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
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Book Description

Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in print. The reissue of this landmark book reflects the continuing importance of McLuhan's work for contemporary readers.

Customer Reviews:

McLuhan's Most Difficult Book.......2007-06-20

The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan's second book, is one of his best, but the reader should be forewarned that it is also one of his most difficult to read and does not make a good introduction for the beginner. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that it is written in mosaic style, in which McLuhan -- like Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project -- creates a text that is largely composed of quotations from mostly obscure authors stitched together with his own commentaries in between. These quotations are from works written in classical academic style, and none of them are easy reading. They require concentration and the book itself takes time to read carefully.

The book is a cultural archaeology of the effects of the rise of print upon Western society in the period between 1450 - 1850. It is concerned with analyzing the new kinds of social and cultural structures which typography brought into being, such as nationalism, the concept of individuality, the idea of authorship and intellectual private property, new genres such as the literary essay and the novel. The rise of the printing press, McLuhan points out, was coincident with the rise of the mastery of depth perspective in Renaissance painting, and this is not an accident, for both the new Euclidean space conception and typography had in common an emphasis upon the organization of the world around the eye favored as a sense organ at the detriment and exlusion of all the other senses. During the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, the senses were still synesthetically woven together like a tapestry, and no single one of them was favored to quite the degree of exclusion which the favoring of vision brought about in the Renaissance. Illuminated manuscripts, according to McLuhan, have a textural feel to them that still relies heavily on the sense of touch, and Medieval art, with its disproportionate sense of space in which one character -- such as Christ -- will be represented as larger than everyone else primarily due to the emphasis upon his spiritual importance rather than his inclusion as one individual among many occupying the same field of homogeneous space, is similarly haptic. Gothic lettering, he points out, is hard on the eye and difficult to read because it is tactile and still appeals to the sense of touch. Roman lettering, together with Arabic numerals, was favored by print, and this had the effect of streamlining the ability to read such that silent reading became common. Printers began to do new things like number the pages, create indices and Tables of Contents, and this had the effect of emphasizing authorship since it now became possible to track citations properly. Typography, McLuhan never tires of pointing out, favors the eye at the expense of all the other senses, and it tends to favor an abstract view of space as a container within which objects are placed in an arrangement that takes all spatial relations into account.

All of this began to change in the nineteenth century with the rise of electric technology and the favoring of discontinuities brought about by the telegraph and the newspaper. This kind of syncopated feeling for space, in which each object begins to occupy its own space no longer held in relation to other objects, began to erode and change the old typographic world of the Gutenberg Galaxy. Electric culture, which McLuhan does not discuss much in this book, favors tribalism, spatial discontinuity, erosion of individuality and the rise of corporatism, decentralization and so on.

This book should be read together with Understanding Media, for the latter volume picks up where The Gutenberg Galaxy leaves off, at the threshold of the Electric Society.

It is a masterpiece of scholarship by one of the greatest intellects America has ever produced, an intellect that easily puts the French po-mo philosophers in the shade. You will get more useful ideas out of any one of McLuhan's books than you would out of a whole crate of books by postmodern French philosophers.

--John David Ebert, author, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Cybereditions, New Zealand, 2005)

45 years ahead of its time!.......2007-06-15

Marshall McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man_ (University of Toronto Press, 1962) is 45 years ahead of its time because not very many persons have understood it very well. With bold strokes, McLuhan has delineated how Western culture is different from other cultures in the world today. For Western culture is still a residual form of print culture, whereas other cultures in the world today are to one degree or another residual forms of oral cultures.

Drawing on Walter J. Ong's account of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought in _Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason_ (Harvard University Press, 1958; 3rd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2004), McLuhan also calls attention to visualist tendencies in Western thought.

In the late 1950s, McLuhan, a Canadian convert to Roman Catholicism, read _Insight: A Study of Human Understanding_ by the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan calls attention to the tendency in Western philosophic thought to equate knowing with "taking a good look." Thus McLuhan was drawing not only on Ong's account of visualist tendencies in Western philosophic thought, but also on Lonergan's.

In the 1994 "Introduction to the Transaction Edition" of his book _Belief and Unbelief_, Michael Novak, who studied under Lonergan as a young seminarian in Rome, nicely paraphrases Lonergan's critique of visualist tendencies in his own words:

"Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the human eye. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) of the bodily senses. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction." (p. xv)

In summary, Western philosophical thought from antiquity down to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450 carried a strong visualist orientation, as Ong has detailed. Then with the advent of the Gutenberg printing press visualist tendencies were much more strongly culturally conditioned than ever before. As is well known, print culture in the West with its strong orientation toward visualism saw not only the spread of the Protestant Reformation, but also the emergence of modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement. Thus the strong orientation toward visualism in the West has helped set Western culture off from other cultures of the world.

However, today modern capitalism as developed in print culture with its strong orientation toward visualism is being globalized through economic globalization. Thus capitalism today is making inroads into parts of the world where print culture did not have the historical impact that it had in Western culture. To varying degrees, the other cultures are residual forms of oral culture, as McLuhan describes oral culture in this book.

Thus McLuhan's pioneering study of print culture can enable us to better understand the world situation as we live through the upheavals of economic globalization.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

Shooting probes.......2006-09-12

This is the first McLuhan book I read, back in the late 1960s. It took me about a month to get through, because each short chapter contained so many new ideas and insights I had to think about them before going on. I didn't always understand them, but what I did comprehend was intoxicatingly exciting.

Many readers of McLuhan treat his probes as absolute statements of truth. Then, if they disagree with him, they reject his whole approach. One important fact to keep in mind while reading this or any of McLuhan's books is that he himself refers to the clever slogans which sum up many of his insights ("The medium is the message" being the best known, of course) as "probes", not facts. Their purpose is to explore an idea in order to stimulate thought. Even if you ultimately disagree with the concept set forth, if it makes you think about it, the probe has accomplished its principal purpose.

An Academic Read.......2006-03-10

Definitely more of an academically written book than McLuhan's more famous "Understanding Media." For new McLuhan readers, I recommend reading "Understanding Me" or "Understanding Media" first.

The orality/literacy debate and McLuhan's media theory.......2005-07-05

This book expands on the views of McLuhan's teacher Harold Innis, who distingusihed oral and written cultures. The book argues that oral cultures are synaesthetic and work with synthetic logic, while cultures of writing push the mind toward singulation of senses, logic and 'perspective'.

McLuhan 'glosses' through a wide range of scattered historical pieces of information to show how oral, written and print cultures have different patterns. He ably shows how printing also transformed art, architecture, society and industry.

The book is thoroughly historical, dense and rich in informative detail. It forms the foundation for McLuhan's clearer theoretical articulation of his ideas in 'Understanding Media', but is more accessible to the layman.

This book belongs to a pantheon of books that revolve around similar ideas like Harold Innis's 'Empire and Communications' & 'The Bias of Communication'; Walter J. Ong's 'Orality and Literacy' and William J. Ivins's 'Print and Visual Culture' and 'Art and Geometry'. But this is the most sweeping, convincing, dramatic statement of the common theory proposed by these various writers.

And for those who love theory with a dose of history, this makes for really delightful reading.

The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society (New York, N.Y.).)

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A Laudable Extension of McLuhan: Cool, Seminal & Involving!
a shameful posthumous misrepresentation of McL.'s thought.
FIGURING OUT THE GROUND

The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society (New York, N.Y.).)
Marshall McLuhan , and Bruce R. Powers
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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The Medium is the Massage
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ASIN: 0195079108

Book Description

Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village, one of his last collaborative efforts, applies that vision to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network. When McLuhan's groundbreaking Understanding Media was published in 1964, the media as we know it today did not exist. But McLuhan's argument, that the technological extensions of human consciousness were racing ahead of our ability to understand their consequences, has never been more compelling. And if the medium is the message, as McLuhan maintained, then the message is becoming almost impossible to decipher. In The Global Village, McLuhan and co-author Bruce R. Powers propose a detailed conceptual framework in terms of which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood. At the heart of their theory is the argument that today's users of technology are caught between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand there is what they refer to as Visual Space--the linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world; on the other hand there is Acoustic Space--the holistic, qualitative reasoning of the East. The medium of print, the authors argue, fosters and preserves the perception of Visual Space; but, like television, the technologies of the data base, the communications satellite, and the global media network are pushing their users towards the more dynamic, "many-centered" orientation of Acoustic Space. The authors warn, however, that this movement towards Acoustic Space may not go smoothly. Indeed, McLuhan and Powers argue that with the advent of the global village--the result of worldwide communications--these two worldviews "are slamming into each other at the speed of light," asserting that "the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously." Employing McLuhan's concept of the Tetrad--a device for predicting the changes wrought by new technologies--the authors analyze this collision of viewpoints. Taking no sides, they seek to do today what McLuhan did so successfully twenty-five years ago--to look around the corner of the coming world, and to help us all be prepared for what we will find there.

Customer Reviews:

A Laudable Extension of McLuhan: Cool, Seminal & Involving!.......2000-12-09

Powers says that this book is not about "final answers." By God he's right! And he proceeds to effloresce a wondrous garden wrought of the print medium brimming over with fresh probes, "osmic space," brains "astonied," the secret lives of "sense ratios," and other electrific, outsized insights and invitations into the futurepresent. One could readily argue and effectively so that "The Global Village..." is indeed a worthy extension of the medium of Professor McLuhan himself, ringing true and resonating orchestrally with the spirit and vivacity of that bright, iridescent, warm and radiant bulb which, tragically, went out suddenly and left us in darkness on New Year's Eve, 1980.

Feed forward 9 years. Powers'/McLuhan's "tetrad" is a mesmerizingly rich metaphor lending clarity and intensity to McLuhan's seminal 1964 probicon, "Understanding Media--The Extensions of Man." This "new" 1989 book is a MUST-read, a reverent continuance of McLuhan's oeuvre, a virtual channeling of his spirit, and in various ways easier to grasp perhaps, more accessible even, than the monumentally revolutionary/visionary UMTEOM.

The beauty of McLuhan and by protraction Dr. Bruce Powers here is that these men are not pedants but facilitators. Their goal, much like that of Carl Rogers or George B. Leonard or Joseph Campbell, is not to pound stuff into brainpans, but to gently yet insistently open up minds to possibilities, perils, challenges, potentialities and joys imperative in the present reality/"reelity?" or whatever one wishes to term the agardish within which each of us swims, breathes, eats, creates, dances, defecates, procreates and seethes.

If McLuhan is the sorcerer, Bruce Powers is his worthy apprentice, now successor. In fact he veritably invites all of us to be successors (McLuhanatics?), to become involved (the essential definition of "cool"). This book is exciting, invigorating, pulsating, intensely involving and above all, highly rewarding. We need more extensions of McLuhan like this one. This is a superb nonbook, a hybrid medium, and a seamless read. TGV will get your probing juices flowing. It's as revitalizing as pure MDMA (as far as "the mdma is the message" goes). Buy this deceptively modest paperback, and step into it like a hot bath.

a shameful posthumous misrepresentation of McL.'s thought........2000-06-09

I'm surprised this travesty is still in print. "Not in McLuhan's style" is a kind understatement; Powers demonstrates flagrant misunderstanding and confusion of basic McLuhanesque ideas. Try 'Laws of Media' or 'Understanding Electric Language' instead.

FIGURING OUT THE GROUND.......1998-09-14

This book is for the McLuhan enthusiast who would like to figure out the ground on which McLuhan stands. It is chock full of McLuhan's ideas, but not presented in McLuhan's typical style. Published 9 years after McLuhan's death, it seems likely that co-author Bruce Powers assembled the material for publication.

If you are not already very familiar with McLuhan's thoughts and earlier writings, this book is not for you. If you are already very familiar with McLuhan's words, you won't find anything new, but you will find some of McLuhan's basic ideas amplified and extrapolated.

Amazon.com

Given the profound influence that the writings and teachings of Marshall McLuhan have had in the Information Age, it is surprising how few people have read anything more than context-free excerpts printed in indecipherable day-glo fonts over a background guaranteed to induce vertigo. But once you actually get around to reading McLuhan's ideas about the Global Village, the history of print, and the rise of digital media, you realize that behind the hype he did indeed make many substantive and influential contributions.

Surprisingly, most of McLuhan's seminal books are still out of print (as of 1996). Luckily, this collection of articles and excerpts from his most important books is a comprehensive and accessible overview of the musings of the "Patron Saint of the Digerati". It includes substantial passages from my favorite McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy (a brilliantly provocative academic treatise about the history and consequences of writing and printing), as well as many articles and interviews you wouldn't find in any of his previously published books anyway.

The main weaknesses of this volume are that it does not include excerpts from the hyper-kinetic and image-packed "The Medium is the Massage" -- his main contribution to pop culture of the late '60s -- and that the sources of each passage are noted only in an appendix. It would have been nice if sources were noted at the beginning or end of each linear text, and I hope this is addressed in future editions. Other than these minor editorial quibbles, this book is highly recommended.

Customer Reviews:

McLuhan 101.......2006-03-04

Measuring the impact of Marshall McLuhan on media studies is akin to measuring the impact of media on man. Modern man's entire scope of understanding is impacted by and funneled through media forms, and the field of media study is almost entirely funneled through the groundbreaking work of Marshall McLuhan. He may not be the least appreciated genius of the 20th century, but he is at least among the most niche-appreciated; for a man whose theories have practical, everyday applications for just about every human on the planet, he is rarely discussed outside the circle of communication and media students, academics, and researchers.

That's where a compilation like this one can come in very handy. For the new McLuhan reader, this generous collection offers enlightening snippets from nearly all of his major works, as well as some informative profile pieces. It's a great introduction to McLuhan specifically, and to media studies in general, and should nicely pique the interest for further study.

THE Intro to McLuhan.......2001-03-19

I trust this is the one compiled by his son Eric.

Anyway, this book seems to read like McLuhan always wanted it: short, digestible bursts of prose.

The Playboy Interview is fantastic. I always generally enjoyed McLuhan in a dialog scenario more than his writings, though his writings definitely tend to have more moving moments of clarity and epiphany.

Understanding McLuhan is essential to understanding media.......1997-03-19

McLuhan was not the first to open up the field of media study with the focus on the media rather than content. But he was the first to see that ALL human artifacts create their own context of effects, and McLuhan remains unsurpassed in the breadth and depth of his understanding. No field of human endeavor goes unaffected by media environments, and this generous collection is well suited to the serious inquirer, whether new to McLuhan or revisiting him with the onset of the latest manifestations of the electronic age--the web and internet

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

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Spoken words to help the written
McLuhan Redux, Or: How Culture Theory Used to Be Done

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews
Marshall McLuhan
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0262633175

Book Description

In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published a series of books that established his reputation as a world-renowned communications theorist and the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. And it was he who coined the phrases "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and popularized other memorable terms including "feedback" and "iconic."

McLuhan was far more than a pithy phrasemaker, however. He foresaw the development of personal computers at a time when computers were huge, unwieldy machines available only to institutions. He anticipated the wide-ranging effects of the Internet. And he understood, better than any of his contemporaries, the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology -- in particular, the globalization of communications and the instantaneous-simultaneous nature of the new, electric world. In many ways, we're still catching up to him -- forty years after the publication of Understanding Media.

In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together nineteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews either by or with Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text has been transcribed from the original audio, film, or videotape of McLuhan's actual appearances. This is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said -- the spoken words of a surprisingly accessible public man. He comes across as outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, and provocative. McLuhan will never seem quite the same again.

The foreword by Tom Wolfe provides a twenty-first century perspective on McLuhan's life and work, and co-editor David Staines's insightful afterword offers a personal account of McLuhan as teacher and friend.

Customer Reviews:

Spoken words to help the written.......2005-06-21

For anyone remotely interested in McLuhan, I recommend this book for the following reasons.
It is a much easier read than most of McLuhan's work, as it is a collection of interviews and speeches which are necessarily more concise, and were for me much more involving.
It gives an insight into McLuhan's theories which can be quite puzzling and abstruse at first. In his speeches and essays, he repeats his same themes in a variety of manners, which help to give the reader a better understanding of the theories.
It's no McLuhan for Idiots (I'm not sure if there is such a thing, based on the nature of his works), but it is definitely a very useful and enjoyable companion book.

McLuhan Redux, Or: How Culture Theory Used to Be Done.......2004-08-21

Marshall McLuhan was one of the very, very few high intellects that American civilization has been able to produce. Like ancient Rome, we are a land of lawyers and soldiers, engineers and historians, and so have little tolerance for the philosophically inclined traditions of the European continent. America, consequently, has no intellectual tradition properly speaking, but rather, has produced a rare collection of strange and isolated geniuses, like Lewis Mumford or Joseph Campbell or William Irwin Thompson. McLuhan was one of these great geniuses, and like those others, his work is difficult to approach for the first-timer. The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, his two great classics, are not easy reading and do not make good introductions to his overall worldview. But, here at last, Stephanie McLuhan has done for MIT Press what Gingko Press out in San Francisco has been unable to do with their repackagings of his classics as critical editions: namely, to produce an excellent, accessible introduction to the writings of McLuhan for those unacquainted with his ideas.
The book is a collection of lectures and interviews arranged chronologically, and so allows the reader to get a sense for the development of McLuhan's ideas as they occurred to him. Also, the lecture and interview formats traditionally manage to capture the ideas of a thinker at his most relaxed and informal mode, thereby streamlining the writing so that the ideas are not occluded by stylistic concerns. The result, in Stephanie McLuhan's and David Staines's case, is a highly readable "McLuhan for Complete Idiots."
One of the major advantages of the book for McLuhophiles as opposed to first-timers is that the material has hitherto been unpublished. This is stuff from the Archives, and so the McLuhan addict may find some material that will surprise him. But then, no matter how many times you've read him, McLuhan never fails to surprise, so brilliant and witty were his aphorisms. And if we find him in this volume predicting future modes of media like the Internet, then we should not be surprised at his prescience, for he is more relevant now than he was back in the sixties. And no one has ever quite been able to philosophize about media as convincingly or with as much depth as he. For all their eloquence, neither Neil Postman nor Walter Ong ever seemed to have his kind of panoramic perspective on the evolution of culture.
One of McLuhan's favorite sayings was that we're always looking in the rearview mirror as we move forward, and so never quite live in the present environment, which remains elusively invisible to all but the artists among us. Now that we look back in the rearview mirror once again, this time to glance back at McLuhan's prophecies, it is becoming evident that he knew more about our future than we know about our present, and so, his work continues to remain relevant. This was how it was done in the old days, when great generalist intellectuals were still allowed to flourish before the University system was redesigned during the sixties to filter them out. There are no more great generalist intellectuals left, and we have largely the universities to thank for this thievery of the Big Picture. This volume provides us with concrete evidence that it was once done this way, with fortitude and style. Once.
--John David Ebert

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

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Serious and witty!
McLuhan's Mythologies
For People In The Know
An important book all should read
Modern-day myth-making turned on its head

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
Marshall McLuhan
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

ASIN: B0007EPUMC

Customer Reviews:

Serious and witty!.......2007-06-05

I am happy that Gingko Press has brought out this handsome 50th anniversary edition of Marshall McLuhan's _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_, and I am looking forward to seeing _The Complete Mechanical Bride_ that Gingko Press plans to publish in the near future. I'd like to provide some background information here regarding McLuhan's first book.

It is hard to say exactly when Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) started gathering the materials and writing the short essays that were published as _The Mechanical Bride_ in 1951. However, Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), has reported that McLuhan was working on this project when Ong studied under him at Saint Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this same period McLuhan was also working on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts in his time, which was accepted in 1943 and published by Gingko Press in 2006.

Because rhetoric has long been understood in Western culture as the art of persuasion, we need to take into account that McLuhan was studying the history of rhetoric in detail when he was assembling the artifacts of American popular culture and writing the witty commentaries about them that came to be published in _The Mechanical Bride_. To spell out the obvious, the artifacts aim to persuade us to buy a product and to imagine ourselves as associating with and perhaps even identifying with the imagery employed in each artifact.

But why bother to write witty commentaries about the artifacts? McLuhan was under the influence of the New Criticism he had studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis at Cambridge University. Thus the short essays in _The Mechanical Bride_ can be understood as exercises in practical criticism (to borrow the title of Richards's most widely known book). To be sure, McLuhan is critical of popular culture, but he takes it seriously enough to write intelligently about it. His short essays are witty and amusing.

--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

McLuhan's Mythologies.......2007-04-12

This, McLuhan's first book, serves as a good introduction to him, since he has not yet begun to formulate his theories about media that would later make him so famous. Consequently, it is easier to read than, say, The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media. It is also much more fun.

The reader should keep in mind that this is still premature McLuhan, for he had not yet read Harold Innis's 1950 classic--which represents the true birth of media studies--Empire and Communications. This book hit McLuhan like an atomic bomb, for it completely ruptured his thinking regarding media. In The Mechanical Bride, he is still analyzing the content of the media, deciphering what the subliminal messages are saying to us unconsciously; but after reading Innis, he realized that it was not the message that was important (at least not for him) but rather the type of medium through which the message was conveyed, for Innis's discussions of how particular kinds of media affected the nature and structure of ancient empires caused McLuhan to realize that it was actually the medium that was the important thing. Whether a culture used clay or papyrus as its means of communication, Innis asserted, determined much about the fate of that culture.

With that caveat in mind, then, the reader is free to roam through these pages, observing a McLuhan that would never exist in the same way again. He comments, sometimes hilariously, on one advertisement, movie poster or magazine after the next. He has interesting things to say about genres like the Western or the soap opera (for instance, he says that the Western is the masculine equivalent to the soap opera, for its values are the opposite of those of the domestic drama) and we also find here, for the first time, his speculations on Sherlock Holmes, a theme that will recur in many of his later writings.

McLuhan at this point had read and metabolized such key thinkers for him as Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion, and they are referred to often in the body of the text. (There even occurs a reference to Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces; apparently the only book he ever read by Campbell, his Irish intellectual colleague who was more concerned with deciphering the messages than the media themselves). McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, is still feeling his way, and he is not yet sure of himself. But it is a delight for the reader to watch this great American thinker--the equivalent, easily, of any of the great French postmodernists (this book bears certain similarities, for instance, to Barthes' Mythologies)--tentatively poking his way about in the middenheap of popular culture, looking for ways in which to organize it into something one can get a grasp on.

I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I did. But do let me know if you don't.
--John David Ebert, author
Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

For People In The Know.......2005-12-05

The "modern gal" knows that "getting ahead" means being the first on her block to articulate the ways her body and cultural practices are transformed into parts and routines -- she reads The Mechanical Bride to "stay in the know" regarding the ways that reflection on the discourse of her body can be used to advance her academic career! And "guys on their way to the top", in academic circles ranging from media history to cultural studies, tune into The Mechanical Bride to find out the latest "swinging styles" in everything from discourse analysis to popular tropes for identity production. Keep it in mind, all you Sirens and Sages of the Academy: When it "comes to success" there is "deep consolation" in knowing that the "cream of the crop" always "rises to the top" because it never "falls out of step" with the latest critical styles -- in a liberal era and place, such as our own, this really is Freedom "American Style"!

An important book all should read.......2005-11-20

I don't make the above statement lightly. All of us who watch television, read newspapers and look at ads of any kind (in essence, all of us who don't live in cloistered communities) need to read this book. We cannot fully conceive of how the media influences us--and I don't mean the liberal media, or the conservative media: just the media--until we have experienced the unique brilliance that is McLuhan. And if you are new to McCluhan, don't worry--the book is organized into short articles that you can read, ruminate on and digest. Read this book, and you'll never be the same--to the disappointment of advertisers and PR people everywhere.

Modern-day myth-making turned on its head.......2005-07-05

This is McLuhan's first book, originally published in 1951 and has been long out of print. It precedes his second book and cult classic 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', by a decade and a half. This is also quite unique in that it has no relationship with McLuhan's more famous theoretical ramblings.

In this book, McLuhan takes on myth-making in US society by showing how film posters, comic strips, advertisements, magazine covers, newspaper layout and articles etc., try to persuade people into something, and yet a close observation of their inherent contradictions allows you to escape their machinations.

The book celebrates deliberate misreading of commonplace things like advertising to show how the persuasive trap of mass culture/consumer culture can be escaped.

All articles in the book follow the format of article/poster/ad, its analysis and some sharp witty aphoristic observations in a boxed area that serve as liberating repartees against the messages that these products of consumer culture intend to send.

The philosophy of the book is derived from McLuhan's premise (borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Maelstrom') that to escape a maelstrom you need to study things going down and things that resurface and align yourself with things that resurface.

In this respect, it can be considered a jargon-free precursor of latter-day deconstructive literary and cultural criticism. And it is much more liberating and enlightening to a lay reader than jargon ridden discussions or purely vehement denuciations of the power of mass culture which don't help laymen liberate themselves anyway, because of their highly inaccessible prose.

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ITýS NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA, ITýS THE LAW

Laws of Media: The New Science
Marshall McLuhan , and Eric McLuhan
Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Communications | Skills | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Media Studies | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

The Medium is the Massage
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society (New York, N.Y.).)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

ASIN: 0802077153

Customer Reviews:

ITýS NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA, ITýS THE LAW.......1998-03-06

This is the recapitulation of the gestation of McLuhan's thought, which culminates in the Laws of Media. The beginning of the book is almost as incomprehensible as that last sentence, but by the time you get to page 93, you will understand it. McLuhan gives us a tool with which to dig out an understanding from the media we see around us. His tetrad approach to analysis is ably illustrated by his poetic examples in part 4. It's not that things get more apparent, but they do become more transparent from his multiple points of view.

If you've already worked through the Gutenberg Galaxy, and want more, this book is for you. On the other hand, if you are unfamiliar with McLuhan, this might not be the book to start with. However, I found the book to inspire new thoughts and insight that come reflected off his refracting whorl of ideas, so maybe it's as good a place to start as any.

Take today; the executive as dropout
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Take today; the executive as dropout
Marshall McLuhan
Manufacturer: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Philosophy of History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books
Civilization & Culture | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0151878307

The Medium is the Massage; an inventory of effects
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The Medium is the Massage; an inventory of effects
Marshall McLuhan
Manufacturer: Bantam Books, inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GSHZSQ

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