Yes Marshall, we are entering a new tribalism, of course we are, where "hot" media that allow of less participation because they make more of the connections for you are being supplanted by "cool" media that allow of more engagement/immersion. Are these the most useful possible terms? Especially when you find that print is "hot" and TV is "cool", but movies are "hot", along with radio and photographs, and in contrast to cool comics. The internet? Unanticipated. And what does it mean that the less engaging media are the ones that, we are to understand, allow for more interpretative space? How is that hot?

There is scads to discuss here but half of it is just disagreeing with his terminology and the other half is trying to bend it till it works. But that doesn't matter, because in the future we'll all have personal robots beaming up cool images that will obviate the individual mind in some unspecified way, and we'll all work together and be like the "savages" again. Or at least, we'll all have tenure.

I feel like this review had potential, much like McLuhan's book, but started too illconceived and got too tangled to be worth sorting out--also, all too often, much like McLuhan's book. ( )

McLuhan raises a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship of media to culture, but is frustratingly haphazard about following through on any of them. I can deal with him making oracular pronouncements with zero evidence to back them up, but it would be nice if he at least carried his ideas a little further, examined culture a little more closely... But I don't know, maybe it's not fair to blame a man for not being Foucault. ( )

Interesting ideas about media. I don't always agree with them, but they always get me thinking. ( )

McLuhan is one of the few thinkers in the 20th century to search outside the normal frames of critical thinking. Even if the media he's talking about is outdated, his discourse is always up-to-date.

The medium is the message - this is where that comes from.