Marshall Mcluhan

Surveys the life and career of the social theorist best known for the quotation, "The medium is the message, " who helped shape the culture of the 1960s and predicted the future of television and the rise of the Internet.

Marshall McLuhan was the visionary theorist best known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message.” His work prefigures and underlies the themes of writers and artists as disparate and essential as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Neil Postman, Seth Godin, Barbara Kruger, and Douglas Rushkoff, among countless others. Shortly before his death, together with his media scholar son Eric, McLuhan worked on a new literary/visual code–almost a cross between hieroglyphics and poetry–that he called “the tetrads.” This was the ultimate theoretical framework for analyzing any new medium, a koan-like poetics that transcends traditional means of discourse. Some of the tetrads were published, but only a few. Now Eric McLuhan has recovered all the “lost” tetrads that he and his father developed, and accompanies them here with accessible explanations of how they function.

Marshall McLuhan was the greatest prophet of the digital age. In the 1960s, McLuhan, a Canadian literary theorist reared on Elizabethan satire and the labyrinthine novels of James Joyce, turned his attention toward the budding and befuddling electronic age. Like most prophets, McLuhan became one through a fascination with God. Prophets divine their wisdom from a source, and Digital Communion shows that McLuhan's was his own Catholic faith. In other words, the greatest prophet of the digital age was an ardent Christian. A reconsideration of his vision can change the way we view the online world. A Catholic convert, McLuhan foretold a digital age full of blessings and sins: a world where information was a phone call or keystroke away, but where our new global village could also bring out the worst in us. For him, mass media was a form of Mass. McLuhan thought that while the print world was visual, the electric world--especially television--was a medium of touch. It enveloped us. For McLuhan, God was everywhere, including in the electric light. Digital Communion considers the religious history of mass communication, from the Gutenberg Bible to James Joyce's literary forerunners of hypertextual language to McLuhan's vision of the electronic world as a place of potential spiritual exchange, in order to reveal how we can cultivate a more spiritual vision of the internet--a vision we need now more than ever.

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.

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.

Unbuttoned McLuhan! An intimate exploration of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in his own words In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published – often in collaboration with others – a series of books that established his reputation as the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between “hot” and “cool” media. It was he who observed that “the medium is the message” and who tossed off dozens of other equally memorable phrases from “the global village” and “pattern recognition” to “feedback” and “iconic” imagery. McLuhan was far more than a pithy-phrase maker, however. He foresaw – at a time when the personal computer was a teckie fantasy – that the world would be brought together by the internet. He foresaw the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology. He understood, before any of his contemporaries, the consequences of the revolution that television and the computer were bringing about. In many ways, we’re still catching up to him. In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together eighteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews by or involving Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text is the transcript taken down from the film, audio, or video tape of the actual encounters – this is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said. The result is a revelation: the seer who often is thought of as aloof and obscure is shown to be funny, spontaneous, and easily understood.

"In Distant Early Warning, Alex Kitnick reveals the story of Marshall McLuhan's entanglement with the art and artists of the twentieth-century avant-garde. It is a story packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Tom Wolfe, Harold Rosenberg, Max Kozloff, and more. Kitnick, though, is not focused on celebrity, instead he carefully forges connections between McLuhan, his theories, and the artists of his time with thorough research and superb use of McLuhan's own words. McLuhan's writings on media spread quickly and his provocations about what art should be and what artists should be responsible for fueled then current debates. McLuhan observed that artists are first to act in response to change, and he believed they should be the ones to which we entrust new media and technologies. Thus Rauschenberg's desire to connect with culture through things is met with McLuhan's faith in artists as bellwethers of the networked world. In his postscript, Kitnick overlays McLuhan's faith onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art's recent transgressions and what its future may hold"--

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.

Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of the modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960s classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively shaped by the means we use to communicate. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'global village' have proved decades ahead of their 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.