30 years after its publication Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage remains his most entertaining, provocative, and piquant book. With every technological and social "advance" McLuhan's proclamation that "the media work us over completely" becomes more evident and plain. In his words, Uso pervasive are they in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, or unaltered'. McLuhan's remarkable observation that "societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" is undoubtedly more relevant today than ever before. With the rise of the internet and the explosion of the digital revolution there has never been a better time to revisit Marshall McLuhan.

When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases global village and the medium is the message in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.

Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village, one of his last collaborative efforts, applies that vision to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network.
When McLuhan's groundbreaking Understanding Media was published in 1964, the media as we know it today did not exist. But McLuhan's argument, that the technological extensions of human consciousness were racing ahead of our ability to understand their consequences, has never been more compelling. And if the medium is the message, as McLuhan maintained, then the message is becoming almost impossible to decipher.
In The Global Village, McLuhan and co-author Bruce R. Powers propose a detailed conceptual framework in terms of which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood. At the heart of their theory is the argument that today's users of technology are caught between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand there is what they refer to as Visual Space--the linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world; on the other hand there is Acoustic Space--the holistic, qualitative reasoning of the East. The medium of print, the authors argue, fosters and preserves the perception of Visual Space; but, like television, the technologies of the data base, the communications satellite, and the global media network are pushing their users towards the more dynamic, "many-centered" orientation of Acoustic Space.
The authors warn, however, that this movement towards Acoustic Space may not go smoothly. Indeed, McLuhan and Powers argue that with the advent of the global village--the result of worldwide communications--these two worldviews "are slamming into each other at the speed of light," asserting that "the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously."
Employing McLuhan's concept of the Tetrad--a device for predicting the changes wrought by new technologies--the authors analyze this collision of viewpoints. Taking no sides, they seek to do today what McLuhan did so successfully twenty-five years ago--to look around the corner of the coming world, and to help us all be prepared for what we will find there.

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.

Originally written in the late 1970s, this book was untouched for more than 35 years. McLuhan passed away before it went to press, but Logan always intended to finish it. Even though much has changed in the three decades since work on the project was halted, many of the points that McLuhan and Logan made in the era of 'electric media' are highly cogent in the era of 'digital media.' Looking at the future of the library from the perspective of McLuhan's original vision, Logan has carefully updated the text to address the impact of the Internet and other digital technologies on the library. McLuhan prophetically foreshadowed the transformative effect that computing would have on "mass library organization," saying it would become obsolescent. It is perhaps no coincidence that a key theme of the book is that libraries must strive to create context given today's hyper information overload. The authors believe this task can be achieved by putting together a compact library of books providing an overview of human culture and scholarship. This book is based on the original text that McLuhan and Logan wrote. Logan's updates are integrated in the main text and clearly identified by markers. This preserves the flow of the original text and at the same time provides updates in the context of the original study. Other significant updates include two new chapters: Chapter 6 provides a LOM (Laws of the Media) treatment of the new post-McLuhan digital media, and Chapter 7 discusses the impact of these media on today's library. A second part to the concluding Chapter has been added to update some of the conclusions reached in 1979, and there is also a new preface.

Essential McLuhan brings together in one concise volume key writings by Marshall McLuhan, the hugely influential guru of the mass media. Today, in a communications environment transformed by the rapid spread of electronic media, McLuhan's insights are fresher and more applicable today than when he first announced them to a startled world in the 1960s. A whole new generation is turning to his work to understand a global village made real by the coming of the information superhighway. This comprehensive collection includes extracts from McLuhan's famous books Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy, as well as selections from his other books, articles, correspondence, interviews and published speeches. There is also a 'sourcebook' of key quotations drawn from the whole body of McLuhan's work, and a full bibliography of writings by and about McLuhan.

In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'Global Village' have proved decades ahead of their time. How do we see the world around us? The 'Penguin on Design' series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar - a professor of English Literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Among his other works are The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Quentin Fiore (b. 1920) is a graphic designer renowned for his collaborations with writers including the academic Marshall McLuhan and the futurist and engineer Buckminster Fuller. If you enjoyed The Medium is the Massage, you might like Bruno Munari's Design as Art, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The media prophet of the 1960s' The New York Times 'In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew' Wired

Reviews
No one understood causality, whether Aristotelian or electric, like Marshall McLuhan. Now, in" Media and Formal Cause," no one reveals understanding of "formal "cause in the digital environment better than McLuhan's prot g son, Eric. In the foreword, Lance Strate writes that M. McLuhan's "Understanding Media" was one of the most important books of the 20th century. For anyone who wishes to understand how things truly work, "Media and Formal Cause" is one of the most important books of the 21st. Arguably formal cause has been the least understood but the most intellectually important of all of Aristotle's four agents or processes of causation. This" small "volume proffers a "large "understanding of this "form"ative, previously mysterious level of invisible creation. Three essays by Marshall (one with co-author Barry Nevitt) and a powerful new essay by Eric give new meaning to" ye olde clich ," "like father, like son." While reading writing that is engaging, encyclopedic, and electric, we discover that formal cause is not what you think... but it is vital to how you think.
-Thomas Cooper, Professor of Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College; author of" Fast Media/Media Fast"
In "Media and Formal Cause" Eric McLuhan updates an important part of his father's work that is often overlooked, the quixotic role of causality in making sense of how new media change the way we construct our environment and our communication. How does novelty cause antiquity? When do effects precede causes? Read on, and you shall find out.
-David Rothenberg, Professor of Philosophy and Music, New Jersey Institute of Technology; author of "Why Birds Sing" and" Thousand Mile Song"
Like his mentor, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Marshall McLuhan was often accused of indulging in mere paradox. But "Media and Formal Cause "demonstrates the profound understanding that underlies the work of both Chesterton and McLuhan, the understanding that we live in a paradoxical world. Both McLuhan and Chesterton attempted to jar readers loose from what Cardinal Newman called "paper logic" into a recognition of the total situation in which we find ourselves. This very readable and accessible volume should greatly assist new readers of McLuhan and remind long time students of just how challenging and exhilarating his explorations were.
-Philip Marchand, author, "Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger"
A sage and perceptive quartet of essays which capture and extend a still quintessentially unique way of thinking about media, via patterns and connections that harken to the ancient world and redound to our present and future.
-Paul Levinson, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; author of "Digital McLuhan," and of" New New Media"

Marshall McLuhan's insights are fresher and more applicable today than when he first announced them to a startled world. A whole new generation is turning to his work to understand a global village made real by the information superhighway and the overwhelming challenge of electronic transformation."Before anyone could perceive the electric form of the information revolution, McLuhan was publishing brilliant explanations of the perceptual changes being experienced by the users of mass media. He seemed futuristic to some and an enemy of print and literacy to others. He was, in reality, a deeply literate man of astonishing prescience. Tom Wolfe suggested aloud that McLuhan's work was as important culturally as that of Darwin or Freud. Agreement and scoffing ensued. Increasingly Wolfe's wonder seems justified."From the IntroductionHere in one 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.

The Global Village extends the visionary work of Marshall McLuhan to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network. It sets out a detailed conceptual framework through which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood.

When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message" in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Introduction 1. Medium Is the Message 2. Media Hot and Cold 3. Reversal of the Overheated Medium 4. The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis 5. Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 6. Media as Translators 7. Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity Part 2: 8. The Spoken Word: Flower or Evil? 9. The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear 10. Roads and Paper Routes 11. Number: Profile of the Crowd 12. Clothing: Our Extended Skin 13. Housing: New Look and New Outlook 14. Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card 15. Clocks: The Scent of Time 16. The Print: How to Dig It 17. Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV 18. The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism 19. Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane 20. The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls 21. Press: Government by News Leak 22. Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride 23. Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses 24. Games: The Extensions of Man 25. Telegraph: The Social Hormone 26. The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim 27. The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol? 28. The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest 29. Movies: The Reel World 30. Radio: the Tribal Drum 31. Television: The Timid Giant 32. Weapons: War of the Icons 33. Automation: Learning a Living

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.

Readers will be amazed by McLuhan's prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed 'global village' that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous.

This new edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy celebrates both the centennial of McLuhan's birth and the fifty-year anniversary of the book's publication. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. This edition also includes new introductory essays that illuminate McLuhan's lasting effect on a variety of scholarly fields and popular culture.

A must-read for those who inhabit today's global village, The Gutenberg Galaxy is an indispensable road map for our evolving communication landscape.

Instead of giving the reader just another collection of articles and interviews, "McLuhan Unbound" gives readers offprints of the original essays.

Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Theories of Communication is the realization of a project begun in the 1970s with Marshall McLuhan and now brought to completion by his son, Eric McLuhan. This collection of short essays assembles theories of communication from a diverse range of famous people – from Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon to Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound – and ends with an essay on Marshall McLuhann’ own theory of communication. While the majority of the essays have been previously published, all are seminal pieces in the field. Their presence together in one volume is a significant contribution to the overall task of understanding culture and communication in our time, and will appeal to both scholars and students interested in the work of Marshall McLuhan.