Word: mcluhanism
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...most responsible for the popularization of McLuhan is McLuhan himself, in part because his ideas are so flamboyant, but more because of his conscious striving to get the message across. McLuhan considers himself a prophet with a mission: to end our colossal and perilous ignorance of media...
...Media, McLuhan insists, are nothing more than extensions of some human faculty. The book, for example, is an extension of the eye. The telephone is an extension of the ear. Each society utilizes a number of different media, but emphasizes some more than others. Naturally when one medium dominates the rest, the human faculty of which it is an extension becomes more important than all the others...
...McLuhan is annoyed by the book-oriented people who criticize the content or television. He argues that the significance of the medium derives not from what it says, but from how it says it. In McLuhan's words, the medium is the message. And the electronic message is turning everything upside down. When we relied on our eyes we needed straight lines. But the television mosaic has destroyed the line and replaced it with the pattern. All of our lines are doomed. The book-age line on the backs of women's stockings has already disappeared because of television...
...joint effort of McLuhan and an artist named Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage is unlike anything ever published before. While everyone else continues to write obsolete eye-oriented books, McLuhan has put out the first electronic book. It does not progress in an orderly, sequential manner, developing from an introduction through the main argument and on to the conclusion. Like a television commercial, it is designed to make an impact rather than to tell a story, and because of the extraordinary visual skill with which it was compiled, it succeeds magnificently...
There is almost no text. McLuhan relies on aphorisms, unusual type faces, and impossible lay-outs to put his ideas across. Much like television, which the book strongly resembles in shape, it requires a great deal of participation. Passages printed upside down or inside-out force the reader to become involved. Many of the pictures at first seem incomprehensible. Only if the reader participates-to a degree he would never participate in a conventional book-is he likely to recognize, for example, the grotesque blow-up of a human foot which covers five full pages...