Background
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 21, 1911. His father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a real estate and insurance salesman, his mother, Elsie Naomi (nee Hall), an actress.
(First edition. One of the most controversial and influent...)
First edition. One of the most controversial and influential books written about the printed book and its role in communications. Mr. McLuhan predicted the book's demise and its replacement by the electronic and video revolution. The book was vigorously attacked by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her book, THE PRINTING PRESS AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE. Lacks jacket. Spine faded. Scarce in hardback first edition. vi, 294 pages. cloth.. 8vo..
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FH7ZCO/?tag=2022091-20
( Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada's most ex...)
Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada's most exciting and original thinker, a member of the small company of intellectual geniuses this country has produced. Works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride , From Cliche to Archetype , and Understanding Media have established his reputation throughout the world and have profoundly influenced our understanding of contemporary communication. In his later years McLuhan was working on a 'unified field' theory of human culture, an effort in which he collaborated with and was assisted by his son, Eric McLuhan. This book is the result of that collaboration. The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the 'logos' to shape all the elements of culture - media - with which we surround ourselves. The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media. 'Media,' the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan's thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by humans: artefacts, information, ideas - every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you're reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed. The laws are based on a set of four questions - a tetrad - that can be applied to any artefact or idea: What does it enhance or intensify? What does it render obsolete or displace? What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced? What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme? Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation. The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802077153/?tag=2022091-20
(Media studies has been catching up with McLuhan over the ...)
Media studies has been catching up with McLuhan over the last 50 years. These essays are drawn from the most productive quarter-century of his career (1952-1978), and demonstrate his abiding interest in the materiality of mediation, from comic books to fashion, from technology to biology. Anchoring these essays are four meditations on the work of his great predecessor, Harold Adams Innis, who first proposed the centrality of mediation to every facet of our daily lives. McLuhan took this task literally; rejecting the specialist approach of academic study, he published in mainstream magazines such as Look and Harper s Bazaar on topics such as sexuality and the fashion industry, in each case bringing to these topics insights that remain startlingly fresh. The essays offer a rare glimpse into a great mind as it works out the implications of the effects of media not only on what we know but on how we are coming to understand our being.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584235829/?tag=2022091-20
(Say the name Marshall McLuhan and you think of the great ...)
Say the name Marshall McLuhan and you think of the great discover's explorations of the media. But throughout his life, McLuhan never stopped reflecting profoundly on the nature of God and worship, and on the traditions of the Church. Often other intellectuals and artists would ask him incredulously, "Are you really a Catholic?" He would answer, "Yes, I am a Catholic, the worst kind -- a convert," leaving them more baffled than before. Here, like a golden thread lining his public utterances on the media, are McLuhan's brilliant probes into the nature of conversion, the church's understanding of media, the shape of tomorrow's church, religion and youth, and the God-making machines of the modern world. This fascinating collection, gathered from his many and scattered remarks, essays, and other writings, shows the deeply Christian side of a man widely considered the most important thinker of our time, a man whose insights into media and culture have revolutionized the field of media study and the way we see the world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1606089927/?tag=2022091-20
(This is the devastating book which first established Mars...)
This is the devastating book which first established Marshall McLuhan's reputation as the foremost critic of modern mass communications. The Mechanical Bride is vintage McLuhan so aptly illustrated by dozens of examples from ads, comic strips, columnists, etc., that those who were stung by McLuhan were hard put for rebuttals. It shows how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we're happy or not. We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584232439/?tag=2022091-20
(First published in 1967, this text is now more relevant t...)
First published in 1967, this text is now more relevant than ever, as McLuhan's foresights about the impact of new media is actualized at unprecedented speeds via the Internet. It portrays technologies as an extension of man, illustrating how our senses are massaged and our preceptions altered as these devices become integral parts of our lives.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584230703/?tag=2022091-20
(Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall M...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195079108/?tag=2022091-20
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 21, 1911. His father, Herbert Ernest McLuhan, was a real estate and insurance salesman, his mother, Elsie Naomi (nee Hall), an actress.
McLuhan studied first engineering and then literature at the University of Manitoba, earning his B. A. degree in 1933 and M. A. in 1934. He then continued his studies in medieval education and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, which granted him the M. A. degree in 1940 and the Ph. D. in 1942.
After several years of teaching in American universities, McLuhan returned to Canada and became a full professor at the University of Toronto in 1952.
In a series of books written while he was at Toronto, McLuhan set forth his "probes" and "explorations" about the way communication influences society. He frankly declined to follow the rules of systematic social scientific empiricism or the rigorous logic of theory building, preferring instead to draw upon his wide erudition and his flair for popularizing his ideas. His books became influential and were highly controversial. McLuhan's theories consisted of a core of related propositions. In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), written before McLuhan's theories had reached their full development, one can see the brilliant attempt of a professor of literature to demonstrate to his students the ideologies that are invisibly (and therefore influentially) built into the content and structure of popular culture. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) is a study of the results of introducing movable type into the culture of 15th-century Western Europe. McLuhan became famous with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). In this book McLuhan made his most comprehensive statement of his theory. He argued that "the medium is the massage, " in the sense that Understanding Media also advanced McLuhan's notions of the narcotizing effects of media and of the distinction between hot and cool media.
McLuhan became a sensation in the popular press and among academics from many different disciplines. His ideas and methods were widely debated. Some critics pointed out that McLuhan was not as original as he seemed, having borrowed and perhaps distorted his fundamental premises about technological determinism from Toronto economist and historian Harold Innis. Others derided his views as utopian or mythical, or pointed out that, though it might be true that a medium has some structural influence as a medium, McLuhan was wrong to ignore the content, purpose, and context of particular messages, such as books, films, television shows, poems, songs, and paintings. McLuhan's refusal to respond to his academic critics with systematic proof, his grandly historical scope, his utopian tone, and the difficulty of translating his ideas into theory and research led to a decline of his enormous influence on academic and popular discussions of media.
(Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall M...)
(First published in 1967, this text is now more relevant t...)
( Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada's most ex...)
(This is the devastating book which first established Mars...)
(Say the name Marshall McLuhan and you think of the great ...)
(Media studies has been catching up with McLuhan over the ...)
(First edition. One of the most controversial and influent...)
McLuhan took the first steps toward his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1937. At the end of March 1937 he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church.
McLuhan argued that human communication media are extensions of one or more of the senses and that use of these media re-arranges the sensory balance by stressing one sense over another. The self-definition of a culture (or a person) can thus be traced, says McLuhan, to the media that the culture relies on. To emphasize the importance of the sensory reorganization imposed by a medium, McLuhan claimed that "the medium is the message, " which he later extended to the metaphor that "the medium is the massage. "
McLuhan claimed that when one of our senses is "extended" through a new medium, our sensory balance is altered in such a way that the other senses become dimmed or "narcotized. " The hot versus cool distinction claims that hot media deliver information in high definition, and hence require little effort from the receiver. Cool media, on the other hand, provide little information, forcing the receiver to fill in what is missing to make sense out of the message, thus demanding a high degree of participation by the receiver. McLuhan wrote that, just as the change from oral and manuscript cultures to print culture had altered history, so, too, the change from print to electronic culture (television, computers) would, apart from whatever messages might be sent on television or computers, bring about a fundamental alteration in human consciousness.
McLuhan argued that images of mechanical technology had come to dominate popular consciousness, so that human beings reduced themselves to mechanical and instrumental objects. He also believed that the invention of print culture made possible the creation of the public and the organization of the public into a nation. Movable type also changed the culture by altering people's sensory balance, emphasizing a visual fragmentation and linearity consistent with mechanical print.
Quotations:
"I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say. "
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. "
"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!"
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. "
"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot. .. for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there. "
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding. "
"American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. "
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. "
Quotes from others about the person
"If he is wrong, it matters. "
On August 4, 1939 McLuhan married Corinne Lewis. They had had six children.