Marshall McLuhan

Eric McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada's most exciting and original thinker, a member of the small company of intellectual geniuses this country has produced. Works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride , From Cliche to Archetype , and Understanding Media have established his reputation throughout the world and have profoundly influenced our understanding of contemporary communication. In his later years McLuhan was working on a 'unified field' theory of human culture, an effort in which he collaborated with and was assisted by his son, Eric McLuhan. This book is the result of that collaboration. The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the 'logos' to shape all the elements of culture - media - with which we surround ourselves. The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media. 'Media, ' the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan's thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by humans: artefacts, information, ideas - every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you're reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed. The laws are based on a set of four questions - a tetrad - that can be applied to any artefact or idea: What does it enhance or intensify? What does it render obsolete or displace? What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced? What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme? Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation. The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.

The New Science

Laws of Media

The Lost Tetrads of Marshall Mcluhan

Do we live in a democracy? Have we ever practiced democratic education? Will our children and grandchildren inherit a sane or sick society and political order? Those are some of the profound questions that this book tackles, within a broad and evocative conversation on civic literacy in America. Amid calls for academic standardization and high-stakes testing, civic education, once a cornerstone of public schools, has been relegated to a tertiary space. The eloquent voices in this text articulate critical perspectives on citizenship education because they realize the future of our commonwealth may well be at stake. This important and timely book is a must-read for those interested in civics, social studies, social education, social foundations of education, and educational policy studies. Yet it will also appeal more generally to all educators and education professionals, policymakers, and public officials: it is written for all those who want to revive more humane possibilities for a polity in peril.

Theories of Communication

David Carson

William Kuhns

"'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"--Dust jacket.

Marshall McLuhan, David Carson

The Book of Probes

Kathryn Hutchon

Understanding Language and Media

City as Classroom

Drew Kampion

Jamie Brisick

David Carson, Recent Werk

Trek

Trek is David Carsons first graphic design book in 5 years. It is the most comprehensive collection of his work since The End of Print published in the mid 90s and documents his travels to address young people in lectures and workshops around the world. Due to the huge success of his first book and the magazines he has directed hehas become the most sought after speaker in the field. His graphic talent evolves permanently and in his other vocation,teaching, his skill is legend. Carson has inspired an entire gen eration of design and art school students across the globe. Trek features excerpts from the highly successful Marshall McLuhan Project, plus work created for high-profile clients such as Nine Inch Nails and Quicksilver. David is based in South Carolina and Malibu. He works as author, music video and commercial director, advertising and magazine designer, consultant, lecturer and teacher.

David Carson, Recent Work

Frank Zingrone

Barrington Nevitt

Maurice McLuhan

Wayne Constantineau

A moving mosaic of impressions that emphasize the contemporary relevance of McLuhan's life and ideas. Their anecdotes and analyses reveal important facets of this century's most interesting thinker, an English professor, media expert, humanist, and humorist so ahead of his time that we are straining to catch up with him today.

Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions

Who was Marshall McLuhan?

&ltI>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 McLuhan's 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.

The study establishes the nature and aims of Finnegans Wake as Menippean satire and interprets the Wake in that light. McLuhan examines Joyce's use of language, and in particular his use of ten hundred-lettered words (thunderclaps).

The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake

Marshall McLuhan's insights are more applicable today than when he first announced them to a startled world in the 1960s. 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.

Essential McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was the visionary theorist best known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message.” His work prefigures and underlies the themes of writers and artists as disparate and essential as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Neil Postman, Seth Godin, Barbara Kruger, and Douglas Rushkoff, among countless others. Shortly before his death, together with his media scholar son Eric, McLuhan worked on a new literary/visual code–almost a cross between hieroglyphics and poetry–that he called “the tetrads.” This was the ultimate theoretical framework for analyzing any new medium, a koan-like poetics that transcends traditional means of discourse. Some of the tetrads were published, but only a few. Now Eric McLuhan has recovered all the “lost” tetrads that he and his father developed, and accompanies them here with accessible explanations of how they function.

The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan

In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.

Eric McLuhan

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