Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication

by Moos,Michel

• ISBN13: 9789057010910
• ISBN10: 9057010917
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Series	xi	(2)
Foreword	xiii
Essays	1	(4)
Marshall McLuban
1 Myth and Mass Media	5	(11)
2 The Electronic Age--The Age of Implosion	16	(23)
3 Acoustic Space	39	(6)
4 The Hot and Cool Interview	45	(34)
5 Radio and TV vs. The Abced-Minded	79	(7)
6 Notes on Burroughs	86	(6)
7 The End of the Work Ethic	92	(18)
8 The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment	110	(11)
9 The Agenbite of Outwit	121	(5)
10 Culture Without Literacy	126	(14)
McLuhan's Language for Awareness under Electronic Conditions	140	(27)
Michel A. Moos
Notes	167