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Title: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, Lewis H. Lapham ISBN: 0262631598 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 20 October, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.32
Rating: 4
Summary: Insightful!
Comment: Reading Understanding Media brings to mind the old line that Shakespeare's plays are nothing but a bunch of clichés. McLuhan's 1964 look at the impact of technology and communications on society is laced with phrases that have become fixtures of modern language, like 'Global Village', 'Age of Information' and 'The medium is the message'. The book seeks to tie together big themes like art, culture, and social and economic history. While often successful at drawing these sweeping connections, McLuhan in certain chapters wanders into what sound like self-indulgent lectures. His analysis of television as a "cool" or low-resolution medium is dated. Phrases like "dig it" and too-numerous references to "the bomb," Mad magazine and skin-divers clearly belong to the early 1960s. But this book is valuable for its prophetic analyses. McLuhan's prediction of an emerging information-based economy and a global integration facilitated by the Internet and digital technologies is stunningly accurate. We [...] recommend Understanding Media to executives working in media, telecommunications and technology, all of whom should have at least a passing knowledge of this classic.
Rating: 5
Summary: How can intelligence survive or be revived?
Comment: Marshall McLuhan introduces us to the world of the media through history and how these media have dominated our life for centuries, from the very beginning of humanity. It explains how the invention of the phonetic alphabet has completely linearly structured our western mind, a structuring that was then amplified by the invention of the printing press. But then he jumps to THE invention that changed all that : electricity, that is still changing all that by making the old principle of linearity obsolete since electricity is founded on the principle of simultaneity. He demonstrates how today controling the flow of information is the only way to control the world. This is both illuminating and frightening. We may wonder if the Internet is not introducing a new principle : the come-back of intelligence, of intelligent analysis of data by the human brain because we finally can bring together and confront several sources and several analytical tools at the same time. The book was written before the Internet. If this is true, then there is hope. But it explains why a society, why so many people resist any new medium : it endangers their fragile equilibrium by expanding one or several of their senses, by disturbing their sense ratios, hence by giving them a feeling of amputation against which they protect themselves by rejecting the novelty. Only artists and creative minds are able to assume the new medium and even see beyond it and capture its potentialities.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Rating: 5
Summary: If it were nonsense, it wouldn't have came true
Comment: I believe many forget this book was written in 1964, before your personal computer and cable television. This book, however dense at times and in my opinion, predicted the explosive of the internet and modern electronic media 30 years previous. For anyone who claims the ideas about the tribal structure are false, need only investigate urban design trends today to see that the large city structure is being abandoned for smaller neighborhoods where people can walk everywhere, quite like they may in a tribe, and how the reintroduction of porches and other features that stimulate neighborhood participation are doing the same. And, if you really want some evidence that Mcluhan could base such an idea on an actually occurrence in his own time, you should read up on housing development in the Orange county of Southern California during the 1950s. A group that included the Eames' and others where they were trying to establish such a tribal urbanism, but the commuter culture was established and thus ruled, people fearing change. All that remained of their ideas were thousands of glass houses that no longer meet building code 22 and the commuter culture led to bad ideas like Brasilia, Brazil. Apparently Mcluhan was just the only person to write it down as society quashed it to remain in the safety of the old. I'm sorry but this book is utterly amazing. I look at everything differently now, everything. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it and apply it. And then you realize it was written in the 60s? Wow. Mcluhan was right on target. For those wanting an intro to Mcluhan and have small attention spans I suggest 'On Mcluhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror'. I am saddened that I can't attend the Center for Culture and Technology. If you are a person who wants to understand the world so much more clearly READ THIS BOOK, NOW! Another review claims that this book will be looked back on as silly 60s trash. Hmmm NO! I am only eighteen years old, never lived during the 60s, and I'm afraid I can see it is all extremely accurate now and can apply everything Mcluhan says to my everyday life and it makes things make allot more sense. READ THUS NOW. And if you wish to be more enthralled read this interview...with the real Bob Dobbs ( not of the church of the subgenius fame). I'm sorry anyone who doesn't like this book or, rather i should say, can't see it as prophetic and right not not worthy of at least my respect if not most people's. Sorry if harsh, but very true.
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Title: The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel ISBN: 1584230703 Publisher: Gingko Press Inc. Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Herbert Marshall McLuhan ISBN: 0802060412 Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr Pub. Date: December, 1962 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society (New York, N.Y.).) by Marshall McLuhan, Bruce R. Powers ISBN: 0195079108 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Essential McLuhan by Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Frank Zingrone ISBN: 0465019951 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: July, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Media and Popular Culture 1) by James W. Carey ISBN: 041590725X Publisher: Unwin Hyman Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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