Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium

by Paul Levinson

Overview

Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium.
Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134738816
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/02/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	712 KB

About the Author

Paul Levinson

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The Reluctant Explicator; Chapter 3 Net Content; Chapter 4 The Song of the Alphabet in Cyberspace; Chapter 5 Online Angels; Chapter 6 From Voyeur to Participant; Chapter 7 The Fate of the Center; Chapter 8 The Mind Behind the Screen; Chapter 9 Way Cool Text; Chapter 10 The Rusted Gatekeeper; Chapter 11 Serfs to Surf; Chapter 12 Beauty Machines; Chapter 13 Balinese at Work Online; Chapter 14 Through a Glass, Brightly; Chapter 15 Spirals of Media Evolution;

Editorial Reviews

'An excellent exposition of McLuhan's key ideas and their relevance to understanding new media.' - New Statesman

'Digital McLuhan is as much Levinson as McLuhan at the end of the day ... this is an extremely useful and thought provoking book. It could not be further from the gold-rush atmosphere in which the Net is most often discussed, and it's all the better for that.' - Irish Times

'A non-systematic look at McLuhan's very non-systematic textual legacy. Levinson shows that despite the info-glut, the medium remains the message - even, and perhaps especially, when the medium has changed.' - Publisher's Weekly

'Levinson continues the illuminating investigation into the evolution of information technologies and their effects on society that he began in The Soft Edge by offering a clarifying interpretation of the works of the guru of media studies, Marshall McLuhan.' - Booklist

'Levinson brings together a rich mix of the most influential and well-known thinkers, inventors, scholars, and doers of Western intellectual tradition, and he does so in such a way that they build a coherent platform on which the discussion of McLuhan then rests.' - Communication Booknotes Quarterly, Winter 2000

'The book is thought provoking [and] comprehensive.' - Intermedia

'Paul Levinson explains the relevance of McLuhan's work for an understanding of new media. This guide to the information millenium is a deliberate wake up call to those unaware of the profound power of the internet to reshape our lives and society.' - New Sabah Times

'An amazingly well-researched, well-written, and above all else, well-educated piece of work.' - Communication Booknotes Quarterly

'Now nearly 20 years after his death, his ideas have come to vivid life in Levinson neatly explicates and makes productive use of McLuhan's theories.' - Booklist

'The often prophetic social and scientific insights of Marshall McLuhan are laid bare in this biography of the man who coined the phrase "the medium is the message."' - Forecast

'Levinson explains why people have become intrigued with McLuhan beyond the 1970s, and why his concepts on the threshold of the digital age hold importance for modern times ... Essential for any thorough study of McLuhan's ideas in today's changing world.' - Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher