Marshall mcluhan ebook free

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.

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.

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.

The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. For over years, philosophy has been our best guide to the experience of being human, and the true nature of reality.

Philosophy can no longer be confined to academia, and 50 Philosophy Classics shows how powerful it can be as a tool for opening our minds and helping us think. Whether you are fascinated or daunted by the big questions of how to think, how to be, how to act and how to see, this is the perfect introduction to some of humanity's greatest minds and their landmark books. Marshall McLuhan's insights are more applicable today than when he first announced them to a startled world in the s. Here, in one concise volume, are McLuhan's key ideas, drawn from his books, articles, correspondence, and published speeches.

This book is the essential archive of his constantly surprising vision. Paper jams, mangled pages, and even fires made early versions of this clunky office machine a source of fear, rage, dread, and disappointment. But eventually, xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, street activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street.

The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements. She examines New York's downtown art and punk scenes of the s to s, arguing that xerography—including photocopied posters, mail art, and zines—changed what cities looked like and how we experienced them. And she looks at how a generation of activists and artists deployed the copy machine in AIDS and queer activism while simultaneously introducing the copy machine's gritty, DIY aesthetics into international art markets.

Xerographic copy machines are now defunct. Office copiers are digital, and activists rely on social media more than photocopied posters.

And yet, Eichhorn argues, even though we now live in a post-xerographic era, the grassroots aesthetics and political legacy of xerography persists. Each contribution works toward a larger critical mosaic that as a whole offers a new version of McLuhan as an intellectual adventurer and cultural icon, of his ideas as complex architecture and brilliant lines. Given McLuhan's prominent status in many academic disciplines, the contributors reflect a multidisciplinary background.

Each essay is unique in its approach. Whereas some are extraordinarily personal and anecdotal, others are intellectually and provocatively engaged with McLuhan's ideas and the manner in which these ideas have been appropriated in contemporary discourse. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

All media are extensions of some human faculty— psychic or physical. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act— the the way we perceive the world. Man was given an eye For many people rationality has the connotation for an ear. The alphabet is a construct of nected. The rational man in our Western culture fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic is a visual man. The fact that most conscious ex- meaning in themselves, and which must be strung perience has little "visuality" in it is lost on him.

Its use fostered and encouraged the habit Rationality and visuality have long been inter- of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial changeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a visual world any more.

The line, the continuum — this sentence is a prime example- "The eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will. Speech is a social chart of this bog. The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization be- gan, the step from the dark into the light of the mind.

The hand that filled the parchment page built a city. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first as- sembly line—mass production. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others.

Man could now inspire—and conspire. Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy con- ferred the power of detachment, non-involvement. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of con- straint and as a means of classifying doesn't work as well in our electronic world.

The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming some- body for having done something horrible.

This feel- ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with every- body else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore. We now live in a global village We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo- tions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.

We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay.

Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington once remarked, "We haven't heard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho- logical responses. We have been left d-a-n- g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantane- ously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classifica- tion to the mode of pattern recognition.

We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co- exist in a state of active interplay. Application of this knowledge multiple models for exploration—the technique of would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling the suspended judgment is the discovery of the room temperature. It would seem only reasonable twentieth century as the technique of invention to extend such controls to all the sensory thresh- was the discovery of the nineteenth.

We have no reason to be grate- ful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation. An astronomer looking through a inch tele- scope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, "How can you tell? The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all pat- terns of environments elude easy perception.

Anti- environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments cre- ates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.

We speak, for instance, of "gaining perspec- tive. Print technology created the public. Electric tech- nology created the mass. The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. There have just been so many of them lately. The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence.

It bred and nurtured the American Dream. It created to- tally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation. The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man's desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self.

It was the pas- toral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian de- mocracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower. The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.

What remains of the con- figuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monu- ments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

The stars are so big, The Earth is so small, Stay as you are. The peren- nial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception. We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on. A strange bond often exists among anti- social types in their power to see environments as they really are.

This need to interface, to con- front environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes. The "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor "ain't got nothin' on. Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each 'thunder' below is a character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced.

In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word.

There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes. McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man: [76]. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater. McLuhan's archetype 'is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment.

In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency.

Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing.

The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which 'ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater. It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.

Powers, provided a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's because it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of Acoustic Space, and it provides a critique of standard 20th century communication models such as the Shannon—Weaver model.

McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of Visual Space — a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model — and that of Acoustic Space — a holistic, qualitative order with a complex intricate paradoxical topology. The 'universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow' [83] inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view.

There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are, in fact, inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the moon. Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the left brain, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy.

The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain is the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of Euclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land.

It is too rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory. McLuhan writes about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too much related to the left hemisphere of our brain, which has a rational and linear focus.

What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of Blade Runner and the novels of Philip K. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right hemisphere of the brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime most humans are still living in 17th century classical Newtonian physics spacetime. Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body.

Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids what McLuhan calls robotism has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , an anthropological study of Japanese culture published in 'Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost.

Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic.

It is simultaneously everywhere. In Laws of Media , published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology i.

McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:. The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the 'grammar and syntax' of the 'language' of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium 'overheats', or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities.

The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

McLuhan adapted the Gestalt psychology idea of a figure and a ground , which underpins the meaning of 'The medium is the message'. He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium or figure , necessarily operates through its context, or ground. McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure medium and ground context together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other.

McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals. All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions about time and space.