Word: mcluhan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book restates McLuhan's increasingly familiar argument: the introduction of the alphabet 3,000 years ago, abetted by Gutenberg's introduction of movable print in the 15th century, turned mankind into the alphas and omegas of a giant cultural alphabet soup. The "seamless" and communal thought processes of tribal, preliterate man were fragmented; perception itself took on the rigid, abecedarian character of writing. Letters led to the "idea," which required structure-beginning, middle, end-and forced the writer or reader out of immediate experience and into an abstracted, objective remove from "group reality." According to McLuhan, the advent...
...MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. 159 pages. Banfam...
Canada's All-Purpose Prophet Marshall McLuhan, soon to be enchaired at Fordham University, has argued for years that the book is obsolescent. Unfortunately, his major testaments (The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media), while full of ideas, were rendered virtually unreadable by soporific syntax and mastodonian metaphors. Now, with the artful aid of a graphics designer, Quentin Fiore, McLuhan gets his message across more appropriately by juxtaposing his text with pictures. The result is a punchy put-on, to be sure, but that only serves to make a point: McLuhan has never taken himself as seriously as his critics have...
...those who have yet to understand McLuhan, this book is a provocative primer. In both text and pictures, it uses the zany Zen technique of shattering orderly thought with irrational accident. Even the title is a gag, deriving from McLuhan's earlier pronouncement: "The medium is the message." That meant, as any anthropologist might have put it, that technology predetermines social structure; hence, tools prefigure the psychology of their users. By punningly altering the slogan, McLuhan merely means that "all media work us over completely...
Aphoristic Armory. McLuhan himself works his readers over with aphorisms and jokes. "If we were to dispose of the city right now," he says, "future societies would reconstruct them, like so many Williamsburgs." Of Renaissance art, which he blames for placing Western man "outside the frame of reference," he says: "A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza." Telstar, movies and jetliners have generated "a worldpool of information"; the clash of cultures in the modern world is a "collide-oscope"; television programming is "the charge of the light brigade." As a result of the information explosion occasioned by modern...