Transforming McLuhan

Book excerpt: "Transforming McLuhan explores the radical, humanist line of descent in interpreting Canadian media and culture theorist Marshall McLuhan's work, rejecting the dominant view of McLuhan as a conservative, uncritical herald of technological determinism and capitalism. This McLuhan is the oppositional critic of modernity, resisting uncontrolled technological change, who seeks new media forms with a human face. Contributors from diverse international and academic perspectives include Douglas Kellner, Nick Stevenson, Gary Genosko, Richard Cavell, Lance Strate, Glenn Willmott, Patrick Brantlinger, Donna Flayhan, and Bob Hanke." ""Marshall McLuhan was the first to theorize and to develop a concept of media, indicating their importance to all areas of society and culture. Today media are far more pervasive than in the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote. Yet his work has still not received its due attention. Transforming McLuhan will begin to correct this oversight."---Mark Poster, University of California-Irvine; Author of What's the Matter with the Internet? and Information Please" ""Transforming McLuhan re-reads the McLuhan phenomenon in light of today's media-saturated, 24/7 news and smartphone world. Here we meet again with the visionary Tiresias in the Underworld whose dark sayings once lit the late afternoon of the twentieth century. These critical readings create a time-out to question him again and to open space-time interstices for alternate thoughts and alternate actions." ---Michael Heim, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles; Author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality and Virtual Realism" ""Transforming McLuhan offers a rich and textured reconsideration of Marshall McLuhan's ideas, demonstrating how McLuhan's work is a better match for current multi-dimensional and ambivalent understandings of media and culture than it was for the narrower conceptions that guided those who dismissed McLuhan in his own time. These provocative and well-written essays persuasively engage in what I have called morphing' McLuhan with other key theoretical frameworks. As a resuit, Transforming McLuhan illustrates that cultural theorists have much to learn from McLuhanism, but that McLuhan's perspective also has much room for enrichment t from critical media studies." ---Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire; Author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Media on Social Behavior"--BOOK JACKET.