Douglas Coupland: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, global village, mass media, print, technology
“Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: “The medium is the message.” Half a century later, McLuhan’s predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of “electronic inter-dependence” have become a reality-in a sense, the reality-of our time.
Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a “McLuhanesque” account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village-now known as the Internet-has come to pass in the 21st century.”
Publisher Atlas & Co, New York, 2010
ISBN 1935633163, 9781935633167
224 pages
review (Nicholas Carr, The New Republic)
review (David Carr, The New York Times Sunday Book Review)
Adam Kotsko: Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · mass media, philosophy, popular culture, television
“Argues that our fascination with cold and ruthless television characters reflects a broken social contract.
Sociopaths are pervasive in contemporary television, from high-brow drama all the way down to cartoons — and of course the news as well. From the scheming Eric Cartman of South Park to the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, cold and ruthless characters captivate us, making us wish that we could be so effective and successful. Yet why should we admire characters who get ahead by being amoral and uncaring? In his follow-up to Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko argues that the popularity of the ruthless sociopath reflects our dissatisfaction with a failed social contract, showing that we believe that the world rewards the evil and uncaring rather than the good. By analyzing characters like the serial killer star of Dexter and the cynical Dr. House, Kotsko shows that the fantasy of the sociopath distracts us from our real problems — but that we still might benefit from being a little more sociopathic.”
Publisher Zero Books, 2012
ISBN 178099091X, 9781780990910
107 pages
review (Siobhan McKeown, The Quietus)
review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
Marshall McLuhan, et al.: Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (1967)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, bauhaus, dada, language, literature, mass media, media theory, music, speech, synaesthesia, telephone, television, text
Revised edition of Explorations magazine, No. 8 (Oct 1957).
With additional contributions by V. J. Papanek, J. B. Bessinger, Marshall McLuhan, Karl Polanyi, Carol C. Hollis, David Hogg, Jack Jones
Publisher Something Else Press, New York/Frankfurt/Villefranche-sur-Mer, 1967
61 pages
via aphasic-letters.com
PDF (40 MB)
Comments (2)