Media research technology, art, communication essays by Marshall McLuhan commentary by Michel A. Moos

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) received his PhD in English literature from Cambridge University and taught in the United States and Canada. He is best known, however, as the founding father of media studies. McLuhan was Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Among his ground-breaking works on the psychic and social dimensions of communication technology are The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962); Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964); and The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967).
Michel Moos' premise is that Marshall McLuhan's importance derives from his achievements in rethinking the entire process of education and training itself, not with his popular fame as media guru, and he analyzes McLuhan's work from the feedback effect his vision continues to provide, rather than from the perspective of interpreting McLuhan's pronouncements on the electronic media. Moos contrasts McLuhan's thoughts with those of such thinkers as Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway, and Deleuze and Guattari, and renders an updated account of the effect of the mass media on our society and ourselves.
The concept "the medium is the message" is the hub around which Marshall McLuhan's explorations revolved. McLuhan's interests ranged from sixteenth-century literature to twentieth-century business practices. With wit and literary flair, he reported the media's influence on society and on the individual. He concluded that we could not escape being transformed by the forces that are hidden deeply within the electronic telecommunications revolution of the sixties. For McLuhan, the new mediums of film, television, and the emerging realm of the digital were the modern equivalent of Gutenberg's printing press.
Essays by M. McLuhan. Edited and with a Commentary by M.A. Moos.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

McLuhan grew up in the prairie country of the Canadian West and studied English at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University. As television entered a period of huge growth during the 1950's, McLuhan, then a college professor, became interested in advertising. He thought of it as something to be taken seriously as a new culture form, beyond its obvious capability of selling products. That interest led to his increasing speculation about what media did to audiences.

In his unpredictable modern poetry classes at the University of Toronto, he spoke more and more of media. The students he taught were the television generation, the first to grow up with the medium. Many were fascinated by McLuhan's provocative observations that a medium of communication radically alters the experience being communicated. A society, he said, is shaped more by the style than by the content of its media. Thus, the linear, sequential style of printing established a linear, sequential style of thinking, in which one thing is considered after another in orderly fashion: it shaped a culture in which (objective) reason predominated and experience was isolated, compartmentalized, and repeatable. In contrast, the low-density images of television, composed of a mosaic of light and dark dots, established a style of response in which it is necessary to unconsciously reconfigure the dots immediately in order to derive meaning from them. It has shaped a culture in which (subjective) emotion predominates and experience is holistic and unrepeatable. Since television (and the other electronic media) transcends space and time, the world is becoming a global village---a community in which distance and isolation are overcome. McLuhan was crisp and assured in his pronouncements and impatient with those who failed to grasp their import.

McLuhan's most famous saying, "the medium is the message," was explicated in the first chapter of his most successful book, "Understanding Media," published in 1966 and still in print. It sold very well for a rather abstruse book and brought McLuhan widespread attention in intellectual circles. The media industry responded by seeking his advice and enthusiastically disseminating his ideas in magazines and on television. These ideas caused people to perceive their environment, particularly their media environment, in radically new ways. It was an unsettling experience for some, liberating for others.

Though McLuhan produced some useful insights, he was given to wild generalizations and flagrant exaggerations. Some thought him a charlatan, and he always felt himself an outcast at the university, at least partly because of his disdain for print culture and opposition to academic conventions. He never seemed quite as energetic after an operation in 1967 to remove a huge brain tumor, but he continued to work and teach until he suffered a stroke in 1979. He died a year later. Though today his writings are not discussed as much by the general public, his thesis is still considered valid and his ideas have become widely accepted.

(Bowker Author Biography)