Marshall McLuhan

Laws of Media; The New Science started as an anticipated 2nd edition to Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In this book the "Laws" are four principles discussed in Understanding Media, used here as a set of four questions to query any artifact created by humans, including theory, procedures, and style. These can also be viewed as four perspectives or dimensions of such an artifact. The four dimensions are referenced in the book as the "tetrad." About eighty pages of the book are devoted to examples of artifacts tested as tetrads. The examples—laid out, per Eric, as poetic stanzas, without further elaboration—can confuse the reader's newly minted understanding of the tetrad; however, one does not need to understand the examples to gain insights from the book, a collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and his son, Eric McLuhan. --F.A. Moore

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.

"It is Michel Moos' premise that the importance of Marshall McLuhan derives from his achievements in rethinking the entire process of education and training itself, and that it has less to do with his popular fame as media guru. He proceeds to analyze 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 sees that effect as a valuable form of feedforward. Focusing on the pressing questions that confront the critical endeavors of the sciences and the humanities in a postmodern age, he proceeds to address the profound theoretical implications of McLuhan's work. He contrasts McLuhan's thoughts with that 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Pictorial presentation of the impact on contemporary society and individual man of the new developments in technology and communications media.

Illustrates how electric technology stimulates more diversity than the old mechanical society.

The author examines all types of communication including photographs, ads, games, television, radio, telephone, comics, numbers, money, clothing, movies, recordings, housing, and weapons.

"'The Book of Probes' is a collection of Marshall McLuhan's finest words culled from his books, his more than 200 speeches, his classes at the University of Toronto ... and from nearly 700 shorter writings he published between 1945 and 1980"--Jacket.

"This brilliant and witty approach to the contemporary scene revolutionized the study of communication theory in our time. Marshall McLuhan's famous pronouncement that 'the medium is the message' is revealed, in this seminal work, by the 'media' themselves--the original advertisements; the contemporary heroes from Tarzan to Superman; the executive gimmicks of 'know how' and 'plain talk' that constitute the folklore of industrial man. Professor McLuhan's penetrating and probing approach has invaluable insights for all readers--general reader or educator, management man or creative writer--indeed, for every consumer or creator in every field. ... Long a famous 'underground' work, The mechanical bride is now obviously the book that pointed the way toward untangling the complicated web of today's communications."--Jacket.