Marshall McLuhan
Mechanical Bride
Gutenberg Galaxy
Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man
Medium is a message: Inventory of Effects
War and Peace in Global Village
The Essential McLuhan
1) pre-alphabetic tribal humankind
oral and accoustic culture, music, rhythm and intonation, sharing of instant sensation and emotion, tribal unity
2) alphabet, writing and printed media = Gutenberg Galaxy
manual and visial culture, literacy, documentation, reason and cognition, separation, society of distant individuals
advance of print technollogy shaped the Modern Western culture: inividualism, democracy, protestantism, capitalism, nationalism
3) electricity and electronic media = Marconi Galaxy
electronic audio-visual recordings, immediate sharing of instant sensations, collective identity, the globe becomes a tribal village
new technologies (alphabets, printing press, speech) ) change our perceptual habits, which affects social organization
the medium is the message
media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of media studies
content had little effect on society
all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways
every medium is a technological extension of human skills
different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium
hot media
enhance one single sense, so the person does not need to fill in too many details
hot media with high definition
cool media
require more effort on the part of the viewer to determine the maning
they do not present the detail too much
the reader needs to be more conscious to extract value
cool media are the onew with low definition (cartoon, telelvision, seminar)