"McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed" is a close reading of all of
his work with a focus on tracing the systematic development of his
thought. The overriding objective is to clarify all of McLuhan's
thinking, to consolidate it in a fashion which prevents
misreadings, and to open the way to advancing his own program:
ensuring that the world does not sleepwalk into the twenty-first
century with nineteenth-century perceptions. Marshall McLuhan was
dubbed a media guru when he came to prominence in the 1960s. The
Woodstock generation found him cool; their parents found him
perplexing. Today he is often referred to as a media ecologist, a
phrase that would have pleased him for its resonance with James
Joyce's Echoland. Joyce's kaleidoscopic verbal creativity
stimulated McLuhan's vision for a unified explanation of everything
from Woodstock to Wall Street, from woodcuts to weapons, in terms
of media and their effects. During his career, he found time to
write about high literature (Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, and
Joyce) and popular culture (movies, comics, and advertising),
managing even to explore the link between them in reviewing the
work of his arch-rival Northrop Frye ("Inside Blake" and
"Hollywood"). By 1963 McLuhan was Director of the Centre for
Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and would be a
public intellectual on the international stage for more than a
decade, then linked forever to his two best known coinages: the
global village and the medium is the message. Both phrases express
a paradox. We easily interpret the first as an image for our planet
dramatically shrunken by the powerful media of instant
communication. Broadband buzz and G3 gossip. For this we scarcely
need McLuhan. But the medium is the message has an unsettling
counter-intuitive quality that provoked critical commentaries -
many of startling irrelevance to McLuhan's thrust and purpose.
Legions of bewildered students and intimidated faculty may have
kept silent, and McLuhan's many interviewers often merely
registered irritation, but Jonathan Miller and Umberto Eco were
among the luminaries who lodged vigorous protests, stumbling over
McLuhan's metaphor for how media operate and how they shape and
control the speed, scale, and forms of human association and
action. This was the key idea at the core of his "Understanding
Media". Even as "Understanding Media" was launched, McLuhan was
raiding psychology, philosophy, structuralism, and taking second
plunder from literary studies. By the end of his career, he had
harnessed the complementarities of figure/ground, cause/effect,
structure/function, and cliche/archetype to his earlier work. Their
full and final expression was achieved in the posthumously
published "Laws of Media". Taken as a whole, McLuhan's writings
reveal a profound coherence and illuminate his unifying vision for
the study of language, literature, and culture, grounded in the
broad understanding of any medium or technology as an extension of
the human body. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear,
concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and
subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging
- or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on
what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books
explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader
towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.
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