Canadian thinker Herbert Marshall McLuhan is a foundational figure in media theory. His work, rooted in philosophy and literary criticism, explores the impact of communication technologies on society. McLuhan is renowned for coining seminal concepts like "the medium is the message" and the "global village," which continue to shape our understanding of the modern world.
Exploring the intricacies of the classical trivium, this unpublished work by a young Marshall McLuhan serves as a cultural history that delves into literary education. It offers a detailed examination of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, revealing their vital roles in classical learning. Through a close reading of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, McLuhan uncovers the connections between various literary traditions from Cicero to the sixteenth century, laying the groundwork for his later media theories.
Marshall McLuhan is celebrated as one of Canada's most original thinkers, with works like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media establishing his global reputation and influencing our grasp of modern communication. In his later years, he collaborated with his son, Eric McLuhan, on a 'unified field' theory of human culture. This collaboration aims to retrieve an ancient understanding of the world, rooted in the power of 'logos' and its role in shaping culture and media. They argue that the invention of the alphabet led to a preference for visual conceptualizations over acoustic ones, exploring the differences between the brain's hemispheres and employing Gestalt theories to define media.
The term 'media,' central to McLuhan's thought, is examined broadly, encompassing all human creations—artefacts, ideas, and innovations, from computer programs to everyday objects. The McLuhans introduce a tetrad of four questions applicable to any artefact or idea: What does it enhance? What does it render obsolete? What does it retrieve? What does it produce when pushed to extremes? Each human innovation answers these questions, and those that do not are not considered products of human creativity. Their laws provide a new scientific foundation for media studies, enabling prediction and encompassing all human activities. This New Science redefines our understanding of human creation and offers a vision for reshaping the future.
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.
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.
Marshall McLuhan was a Roman Catholic with a profound understanding of the traditions of the Church and of Catholic doctrine. This book is a collection of material extracted from McLuhan's many scattered remarks, essays and various writings on religion. It is a powerful expose of his brilliant insights into theology, the Church and the Global Village and shows the deeply Christian side of a man considered by many to be one of the most important thinkers of our time.
Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.
