Only good if you don't take it as serious politics/cultural studies, and even then it's pretty ridiculous. A lot of it looks absurd in the context of the 40 odd years of technological and political. development since this was written. The idea that modern technology is particularly liberating, especially, doesn't look like much now. It's weird because he seems to make comments every so often which show the essential similarity between modern technology and older technology but he doesn't let it change his rather bold predictions of the coming massive societal changes due to technology. The text is written kind of confusingly a lot of the time. Overall it's just a bit crap.

The "art" aspect is pretty poor and I really don't appreciate stuff like mirror text.

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog." Really? Is there any reason to believe this at all?

"The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible." No reason to consider this true.

"In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore." First, "tribal societies"?? Lazy as hell. There's a lot of ideas about "primitive" society in this that are just claptrap. And second guilt is just as private. Like he regularly says that technology is making the world more connected and social yet the reality is that things haven't changed much in that respect and if anything we've become *more* atomised - the reams of analysis about neoliberalism bear this out.

"The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are." Very unpleasant "sheeple" style talk, no reason at all to believe this really.

I really think humour actually works to reinforce existing prejudices - it's generally done before thought, based on your pre-existing ideas.

"Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent." The problem is always to invent new ways of labour-saving, because that's capitalism. We have always needed to adjust to changes, it's a constant. There's been several serious changes in the past 1000 years (emergence of capitalism for a start). This is not new and not accurate.

He claims that television will not work as a background. Heh. His idea that television means the viewer participates whereas other mass media is just a "packaging device" makes no sense and is never explained.

I disagree with most of what he says and he never argues it or anything, it's just there. It feels super wanky, like adbusters or something. There's even a John Cage quote about how the I-Ching helped him find "joy". There are a few ok bits but it's not worth going through the rot.

"Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonial rebellions" is stretching the truth a lot.

Talk about "Orientalizing" the West is gross and racist and makes no sense.

The idea that electronic media brings us into a village again has not really been borne out at all.

Will appeal if you love going on about "spectacle", "sheeple" or talking about how revolutionary twitter is. Will not appeal if you want decent politics, good arguments, good writing, good analysis, or good art. Admittedly I'm probably being unfair with a 1 star rating, but I'm sick of technological fetishism and there really wasn't anything convincing or exciting in this. ( )

I hate it when my review is above the global average but, come on! MCLUHAN!

"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." ( )

Creative idea but not executed in a way that was especially conducive to my learning. I’d have preferred to read something more wordy as I thought the ideas were very interesting but not always accessible. ( )

Perhaps if I took a course in media studies, I would understand this book. I actually read it about age 13, I believe, and I can't say that fifty years later I understand it any better. ( )

McLuhan proclaims that electronic media technology can bring the world together and unite thought and action in a way that print technology made separate. He doesn’t argue these points as much as issues provocations, complimented by the book’s sleek design and imagery. A generous reading is that he’s trying to stir thought, to get the reader to come to their own conclusions and connect the dots. Others might say that he avoids making arguments because his ideas are weak, and he cannot back them up. I fall into the latter camp.

He critiques printing, which partially revolves around the technology of the alphabet. Allegedly, the alphabet trains us to see things in a connected and continuous way. Since the alphabet and words involve breaking things down and constructing meaning, he says that this fragmenting is how humanity now thinks.

Fragmented compared to what? My admittedly limited understanding of non-literate people is that they tend to have ideas about the world that are “connected.” How could one move about the world not believing things are connected? What does “continuous” mean anyways? Also, modern communications technologies don’t function too different from the alphabet, if any have supplanted it at all. For instance, memes take images out of their context and use them to represent a mood, idea, opinion, etc. Isn’t this breaking things down and constructing meaning through fragmenting?

He points out that the printing press was the first instance of mass production and alleges that reading facilitates a private point-of-view involving detachment and a cult of individualism. He’s arguing that networked society brings us back into oral dialogue of the village, since we all have access to communicate with each other instantly. Hence, the “global village.”

The critique of the printing press is probably fair, and I can understand detachment and individualism resulting from solitary reading. But where does reading aloud fit into this, or talking about a book with others? Reading can facilitate dialogue or be as individualistic as listening to someone talk on TV. Printing and reading are surely worth critique, but nothing like the rigorous dialogue of ancient Greece has come about since the spread of TV and the internet. Instead, attention spans have declined while our understandings of things have become shallower, as Nicholas Carr puts it.

Furthermore, though communications media has brought people the ability to communicate across the world, we are living in a period where nationalism and racism are surging. Perhaps our situation mirrors the “global village” McLuhan heralds, but Othering has remained. Rather than virtual distance and communication technology, this ugly human tendency is likely rooted in politics, the economy, and psychology.

He believes the discord between generations in the Sixties results from society’s expectations that older technologies are expected to solve contemporary problems. He homes in on schooling, which deploys older strategies for imparting fragmented knowledge, meanwhile children receive a wider image of the adult world simply by watching TV.

He argues that electric technology fosters involvement and participation. He probably meant it in a good way, but this reminds me of the computer application Slack, which acts as a chatroom for workplace “teams”. Prior to Slack, there was not expectations for a work colleagues to be in constant communication. Instead, you would do your work, and talk to co-workers when you needed to.

Slack brings co-workers together in a space paid by the employer, who have the possibility of surveilling and reviewing the communications. Employees know this. Slack then acts as a centralization tool. The participation and involvement are synonymous with increased productivity. We are always there, always in-tune to the details of the work, and always available for informal communication.

McLuhan argues that instead of “the public,” electrical technology supposedly creates “the mass” who use multiple “modes of exploration” rather than walking around with ones’ own fixed POV. Here it is obvious how McLuhan doesn’t make arguments, he issues proclamations. What is a “mode of exploration”? Is it just that I think the masses’ ideas instead of those brought to me by the schoolteacher or book? That just seems like groupthink.

If printing caused fixed POVs, how does this vague “mass” offer new modes? What new modes? How are they able to break the fixed POV? Aren’t TV shows and movies also shown from the same POVs: first-person, third-person, ensemble, etc?

Overall, I think McLuhan was onto big societal transformations taking place in the Sixties. He just exaggerated the responsibility and role of media technology in bringing it about. He was right to point out the importance of the media/medium, but his mistake was being optimistic about it.
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