Digital McLuhan: A Guide To The Information Millennium

Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas, developed in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, presaged a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. McLuhan's phrase, "the medium is the message" is his best known and most misunderstood concept. Paul Levinson presents the accuracy of McLuhan's thinking unavailable while he was alive, and shows him as a man struggling to communicate in an electronic pattern via the straightjacket of paper. Levinson also examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age. By exploring the technological influence in industries from publishing to politics, entertainment to business, McLuhan opened the doors for understanding the human relationship with technology. Levinson's own exploration of McLuhan's significance in the new electronic generation clarifies the prophetic insights, principles and constructs in McLuhan's work.

Library Journal

In this interesting if narrow work, Levinson (The Soft Edge, LJ 2/1/98) explains why Marshall McLuhans theories about the media are more relevant in todays digital age than when they were first presented during the age of television. Levinson points out that the Internet will be the vehicle for a convergence of books, television, and other media such as the telephone, thus making it much more, much different from any prior media. He then applies McLuhans tetrad, the four laws of media, which shift from warning us to remove our past-tinted glasses when looking at the future to indicating what type of territory we might see when those glasses are removed. McLuhan led the way in understanding the relationship of humans to technology; as Levinson attempts to show, his principles have been validated by the Internetwhich to many readers may already be obvious. Recommended for specialized collections.Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago

Paul Levinson is President and founder of Connected Education, offering graduate courses on the Internet for more than a decade. He is the author of The Soft Edge (Routledge, 1997), Mind at Large (1988), Electronic Chronicles (1992) and Learning Cyberspace (1995). His science fiction stories have been nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards. He is Visiting Professor of Communications at Fordham University in New York City.