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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
Ridiculous, good fun and accessible sociology. What's not to love?
informative
mysterious
Anyone studying Media Ecology needs to read this alongside the more text-focused writings of the cultural prophet. He gets a lot blatantly wrong, and a LOT about what would become the internet and all we know very, very right.
informative
reflective
a (beautiful) visual demonstration of its own thesis
ALL male pronouns. Really? I mean it was written in '67 but still. Rude.
Visually stunning but I wasn’t a fan of the actual content. The writing felt excessively heady/aloof and my takeaways were limited. And I thought it was *very* bold (and just plain incorrect) of McLuhan to praise Hollywood as a “fomenter of anti-colonialist revolutions,” especially considering the colonialist language in this book (generalized “tribal” to mean primitive) and his exaltation of various white male thinkers/creators.
Edittt upon second read: Still think the writing was at times too heady, but I understood + appreciated it more this time around because I gave myself more time to pause and think about / digest the words. Also on this read it’s clearer to me that he’s trying to be anti-colonial, but def falls short at several points.
Edittt upon second read: Still think the writing was at times too heady, but I understood + appreciated it more this time around because I gave myself more time to pause and think about / digest the words. Also on this read it’s clearer to me that he’s trying to be anti-colonial, but def falls short at several points.
Not really sure when I finished it but I did
Obviously good love McLuhans writing dtyle
Obviously good love McLuhans writing dtyle
It's a stunning moment when you encounter a perfect critique of Twitter inside a book written in 1967.
There's a dogged and somewhat stodgy attempt to ape the television aesthetic of the time within this book, and the use of counter-culture or otherwise groovy images between and around the text makes this short book an even quicker than normal read. But as much as there is becomes an interesting and thought-provoking look into McLuhan's mid-sixties work. He has progressed even beyond memes to become simply part of the language; "you know nothing of my work" is a regressive catch-all for a theorist who helped define the world in which we live. To go back and read his ideas as he wanted them presented is occasionally shocking and often surprising.
He was not of the current generation even at the time, and McLuhan will take great pains to remind you of that. Was it international law that all voices of authority had to be confounded by The Beatles? But he was observant and damn smart to boot. If you want to get a taste of how he wanted his ideas presented, you could do worse than to start here.
There's a dogged and somewhat stodgy attempt to ape the television aesthetic of the time within this book, and the use of counter-culture or otherwise groovy images between and around the text makes this short book an even quicker than normal read. But as much as there is becomes an interesting and thought-provoking look into McLuhan's mid-sixties work. He has progressed even beyond memes to become simply part of the language; "you know nothing of my work" is a regressive catch-all for a theorist who helped define the world in which we live. To go back and read his ideas as he wanted them presented is occasionally shocking and often surprising.
He was not of the current generation even at the time, and McLuhan will take great pains to remind you of that. Was it international law that all voices of authority had to be confounded by The Beatles? But he was observant and damn smart to boot. If you want to get a taste of how he wanted his ideas presented, you could do worse than to start here.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
How was this book written over 50 years ago?!?
Bloody brilliant. Punched-in-the-stomach-type gasps reading it. Genius!
Bloody brilliant. Punched-in-the-stomach-type gasps reading it. Genius!
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Fantastic - Even more relevant today!