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    McLuhan For Beginners
    McLuhan For Beginners
    McLuhan For Beginners
    Ebook280 pages1 hour

    McLuhan For Beginners

    By W. Terrence Gordon and Susan Willmarth

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    About this ebook

    Marshall McLuhan was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of the 20th century. He was so far ahead of his time that he predicted the future and offered a critique of human behavior in a media saturated world that is perhaps more valuable in today’s Internet age than it was in his own time.

    McLuhan pioneered the study of Media, unified Art and Science, and warned us about the perils of a televised, computerized, famous-for-15-minutes, social media world. A world where we would live in each other’s faces, and become so alike, so isolated, so anonymous that violence would become a scream of identity, a way of saying, “I am not invisible.” McLuhan tried to teach us to guard against these dehumanizing, debasing effects of technology, and a thousand other things, but we got reality television anyway.

    The centennial celebration of McLuhan’s life and the re-release of his books has led to a surge of new interest in his thinking and teachings. McLuhan For Beginners provides an essential introduction that is clear, comprehensive, and easy to remember. It is full of wise and witty art by Susan Willmarth that is a perfect match to W. Terrence Gordon’s writing. McLuhan envisioned the media generated Global Village before it existed, and no one since McLuhan has described its allure and pitfalls better.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFor Beginners
    Release dateOct 30, 2012
    ISBN9781939994165
    McLuhan For Beginners
    Author

    W. Terrence Gordon

    W. Terrence Gordon has published more than twenty books, including McLuhan For Beginners and Linguistics For Beginners. He is currently at work on a book about James Joyce and a biographical fiction about the legendary linguist Charles Kay Ogden. When he is not busy writing or teaching, Gordon photographs the haunting beauty of Nova Scotia, Canada, where he has lived since the 1970s.

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      Book preview

      McLuhan For Beginners - W. Terrence Gordon

      For Beginners LLC

      155 Main Street, Suite 211

      Danbury, CT 06810 USA

      www.forbeginnersbooks.com

      Text: © 2012 W. Terrence Gordon

      Illustrations: © 2012 Susan Willmarth

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

      A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book

      Copyright © 2012

      Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

      eISBN: 978-1-939994-16-5

      For Beginners® and Beginners Documentary Comic Books® are published by For Beginners LLC.

      v3.1

      CONTENTS

      Marshall McWHO?

      What Is So Special About Marshall McLuhan?

      McLuhan’s Point Of View

      Stepping Into McLuhan’s Bio

      Influences

      Student & Teacher

      THE MECHANICAL BRIDE

      EXPLORATIONS & Idea Consultants

      Exploring THE GUTENBERG GALAXY

      Understanding UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

      (Re)Defining Media

      (Re)Defining Message

      Medium = Message

      Media Gains & Losses

      Classifying Media: Hot & Cool

      Station Break

      Amputations

      Sense Ratios

      The Microphone At Mass

      Rubbing Media Together

      Medium + Medium = Message

      It’s A Triple Play!

      The Alphabet

      Media Metaphors

      The Money Is The Metaphor

      The Key To The Car

      Art For Our Sake

      Electronic Pentecost

      Comparing Media

      McLuhan On Television

      Mosaic Man And All-At-Onceness

      Connecting The Dots

      TV As Teaching Tool

      McLuhan On Advertising

      CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS =

      Business Is Our Culture

      The Global Village

      FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE

      Clichés & Probes

      Archetypes

      THE MECHANICAL BRIDE: Comic Strips

      Kroker’s PANIC ENCYCLOPEDIA

      Panic Art

      Panic Ads

      Closure: THE LAWS OF MEDIA

      The Four Laws

      Extension

      Obsolescence

      Retrieval

      Reversal

      Media Tetrads

      A Tetrad Sampler

      Wrapping It Up

      What haven’t you noticed lately?

      Bibliography

      Index

      The author gratefully acknowledges the help of the following people:

      Eric McLuhan

      Arthur Kroker

      Greg Skinner

      John Barry

      Lee Robertson

      Jane Williamson

      and Tim, isn’t this a surprise,

      after all these years?

      f you are like most people, you’ve probably heard of Marshall McLuhan—the man Playboy magazine called the High Priest of popcult and the Metaphysician of Media—and You probably even recognize a couple of the phrases he came up With—the medium is the message arid the global village—but that’s about it. Not only have you never read any Of McLuhan’s books, you’ve probably never read anything that makes you. think you should.

      ...the new environment that McLuhan discerns should be studied as carefully as the O2 system in the Apollo spaceship. Just possibly, understanding McLuhan may help ensure that earth’s environment sustains rather than destroys the crew.

      McLuhan is a synthesizer. He has gathered amorphous and scattered ideas, thought them through with force and vivacity, and opened up new areas of awareness.

      NOVELIST GEORGE P. ELLIOTT

      McLuhan’s teaching is radical, new, animated by high intelligence, and capable of moving people to social action. If he is wrong, it matters.

      AUTHOR TOM WOLFE

      "Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov…what if he is right?"

      McLuhan was an obscure Canadian professor of English till he published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. The paperback edition became the fastest selling nonfiction book at Harvard and other universities—with no advertising or promotion! Understanding Media was the book that brought Marshall McLuhan to public attention as a media analyst and catapulted him to international prominence. For the next fifteen years, McLuhan lectured passionately to academic and popular audiences, engaging in all kinds of debates and forums around the world on his key theme: how technology affects the forms and scale of social organization and individual lives.

      By 1980, the year McLuhan died, cable TV had not yet come to the Amazon jungle. The inhabitants of the global village he spoke of still knew nothing, or little, about interactive television, PCs, CDs, talking books, the world wide web, terminal node controllers, optical discs, pocket computers, the Internet, optical fiber or laser technology.

      A few years ago, when Wired, the terminally hip, future-friendly, magazine of the computer age was hyper-conceived, Marshall McLuhan was chosen as the magazine’s patron saint. Wired exploded into 1996

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