reflections contemporary understanding communications

books:

Forward through the rearview mirror : reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan

4 reviews
Marshall McLuhan, Paul Benedetti, ...

Prentice Hall Canada, 1996

McLuhan for the coffee table.
If McLuhan is new to you, and/or if you have a short attention span, this is the one to pick up. McLuhan's timeless insights into the evolution of man's synthesized environment are juxtaposed with in-your-face photographs and artwork that serve as indisputable evidence of the truth of his analysis. Reading this book at 30,000 feet, I was struck at just how clearly McLuhan is able to ...

The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion

2 reviews
Marshall McLuhan, Jacek Szlarek

Gingko Press, 2002

Light on McLuhan
"Not only am I a Catholic," McLuhan candidly reveals conversationally, but the worst kind--a convert!" Everyone who knew that tidbit of information about the guru of media probably couldn't help wondering if it made a difference, and if so, how. As this book reveals, it did--at least to McLuhan. In that context, he was not only experimenting in the realm of media, and exploring its effects, but ...

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

2 reviews
Marshall McLuhan

Gingko Press, 2003

A tremendously original and thought- provoking work
This is one of the rare works which seem to explain new realities in a way which no one else before has grasped. It is the kind of work that gives a ' whole new picture of what is happening'. And if for this alone this work would be of great value. I am by no means a media expert and cannot really comment on many of the claims of the work . Its virtues are in calling attention to the new ...

War and Peace In the Global Village

4 reviews
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore

Gingko Press, 2001

Lousy title, great book.
If McLuhan hadn't been dead for almost twenty years, he could have written this book yesterday. He speaks to this moment in time. "We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies." He makes the point that we have met the enemy and they is us. He asserts that man has evolved beyond Darwin's limited concept of biological evolution, and we have evolved ourselves with our ...

The Essential Mcluhan

3 reviews
Marshall Mcluhan, Eric Mcluhan, ...

Basic Books, 1996

Understanding McLuhan is essential to understanding media
McLuhan was not the first to open up the field of media study with the focus on the media rather than content. But he was the first to see that ALL human artifacts create their own context of effects, and McLuhan remains unsurpassed in the breadth and depth of his understanding. No field of human endeavor goes unaffected by media environments, and this generous collection is well suited to the ...

The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time

3 reviews
Marshall McLuhan

Gingko Press, 2006

the essential roots of McLuhan
Thank you, Gingko Press. Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made. Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural ...

The Gutenberg Galaxy: 2

13 reviews
Marshall McLuhan

Signet, 1969

The orality/literacy debate and McLuhan's media theory
This book expands on the views of McLuhan's teacher Harold Innis, who distingusihed oral and written cultures. The book argues that oral cultures are synaesthetic and work with synthetic logic, while cultures of writing push the mind toward singulation of senses, logic and 'perspective'. McLuhan 'glosses' through a wide range of scattered historical pieces of information to show how oral, ...

The mechanical bride: Folklore of industrial man (Beacon series in contemporary communications)

5 reviews
Marshall McLuhan

Beacon Press, 1970

Modern-day myth-making turned on its head
This is McLuhan's first book, originally published in 1951 and has been long out of print. It precedes his second book and cult classic 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', by a decade and a half. This is also quite unique in that it has no relationship with McLuhan's more famous theoretical ramblings. In this book, McLuhan takes on myth-making in US society by showing how film posters, comic strips, ...

Laws of Media: The New Science

1 review
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan

University of Toronto Press, 1992

ITýS NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA, ITýS THE LAW
This is the recapitulation of the gestation of McLuhan's thought, which culminates in the Laws of Media. The beginning of the book is almost as incomprehensible as that last sentence, but by the time you get to page 93, you will understand it. McLuhan gives us a tool with which to dig out an understanding from the media we see around us. His tetrad approach to analysis is ably illustrated by his ...

Letters of Marshall McLuhan

1 review
Marshall McLuhan

Oxford University Press, 1987

To the point of absurdity, but still true enough
McLuhan is a comic hero for me. What seemed mysterious about McLuhan's mirth, when I was merely reading his books, might be even worse, now that I can`t stop thinking about how he topped everyone else, driven, as only a McLuhan fan would be, into trying to explain how Marshall McLuhan writing letters, attempting to explain his wildly radical ideas to the people of his world, ought to be ...

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

1 review
Herbert Marshall. McLuhan

Vanguard Press, 1967

Marshall knew it back then what is right here, right now!
If you are reading this review, you are doing exactly what Marshall feared most and predicted back in 1969 when laying his thoughts, joys and fears of electronic media and the de-evolution of arts and humanities. Yes HUMAN-ities are soon to be completely erased from whatever fast food culture is left in 2000 and beyond. Humans slowly have evolved over time from human beings to Humans doing. And ...

Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding : A Biography

2 reviews
W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan

Basic Books, 1997

Fine intellectual biography
Mr. Gordon concentrates on Mcluhan's intellectual development and shows McL.'s work as a single work in progress built on a unique foundation. It is not as merely gossipy as Marchand's biography, and not for the reader unfamiliar with the world of ideas McL. dealt with. There is nothing of the pop celebrity here, but a serious presentation of the intellectual ground under all of McLuhan's work.

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

1 review
Marshall McLuhan

The MIT Press, 2004

Spoken words to help the written
For anyone remotely interested in McLuhan, I recommend this book for the following reasons. It is a much easier read than most of McLuhan's work, as it is a collection of interviews and speeches which are necessarily more concise, and were for me much more involving. It gives an insight into McLuhan's theories which can be quite puzzling and abstruse at first. In his speeches and essays, he ...

Counter blast

1 review
Marshall McLuhan

Rapp & Whiting, 1970

Information age philosophy in a nontraditional format.
I liked this book. The text is presented in an alternative fashion that really makes you think. Marshall McLuhan portrays his philosophy that the written language and industrial technology lead to a non-tribal life style, and a less feeling society, and that the new information age (television and computers) are leading society back to a tribal, verbal, more feeling society. In Counterblast, ...

The Medium Is The Message

1 review
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Random House, 1967

Applicable Today.....Yes!
Marshall McLuhan argued that the content of a medium was irrelevant to the effect of the medium to culture. McLuhan argued that the application of a technology was less relevant then the inherent effect of the technology itself. It is important to understand what McLuhan considered technology in order to understand how broad of a concept that McLuhan considered his statement on technology ...

Understanding Media-The Extensions of Man

27 reviews
Marshall McLuhan

Signet NAL, 1964

A WORLD WITHOUT WALLS
With all the ink spilt over UNDERSTANDING MEDIA it is easy to forget that it is just a book full of printed words, one of the media McLuhan discussed. Wait one second, if the message, in itself, doesn't really matter, if the media is the message, what differentiated this book from any other? It was his literary style, his dichotomies, his analogies and his metaphors. The fact is that ...

Culture Is Our Business

1 review
Herbert Marshall. McLuhan

McGraw-Hill, 1970

This book was fun to read.
This book is a fun read. McLuhan puts forth his philosophy of technology and the information age through the use of magazine advertisements from the sixties. It was interesting and fun to read the old advertisements, and compare the advertising methods and values of the sixties to today. Some of the advertisements were just down right funny.

The Medium is the Massage

22 reviews
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore

Gingko Press, 2005

My view of the world ...
... was profoundly influenced by this book. I read it about 30 years ago. I'm pleasantly surprised to find it still in print.

Mechanical Bride

1 review
Marshall McLuhan

Beacon Press, 2000

This book could have been written in 2004
Although it was published in 1951, the critical analysis of advertising saturation that McLuhan presents in this book applies equally in the 21st century. Although the mechanisms of media delivery have changed, the message that they deliver has not. Although the once-contemporary references may require additional research on the part of a younger reader, the book does not suffer overtly because ...

Marshall Mcluhan-Unbound

1 review
Terrence W. Gordon, Marshall McLuhan

Gingko Press, 2005

brainiac in a box
This is a delightfully rendered collection of short pieces/lectures by a thinker that few have surpassed in sheer range and raw intellect and at this price one would be foolish to not add it to your library.

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