Paul Levinson: Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (1999)

“Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan’s ideas, developed in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, presaged a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message” is his best known and most misunderstood concept. Paul Levinson presents the accuracy of McLuhan’s thinking unavailable while he was alive, and shows him as a man struggling to communicate in an electronic pattern via the straightjacket of paper. Levinson also 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. By exploring the technological influence in industries from publishing to politics, entertainment to business, McLuhan opened the doors for understanding the human relationship with technology. Levinson’s own exploration of McLuhan’s significance in the new electronic generation clarifies the prophetic insights, principles and constructs in McLuhan’s work.”

Publisher Routledge, 1999
ISBN 041519251X, 9780415192514
226 pages

Keywords and phrases: personal computer, theremin, rear-view mirror, Marshall McLuhan, tetrad, Connected Education, Neil Postman, RealAudio, mass media, CP/M, Communications Decency Act, global village, Media Ecology, Internet, Gutenberg Galaxy, Paul Levinson, voyeurs, Eric McLuhan, Kaypro, RealVideo.

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967–) [EN, ES, PT]

“Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all­-pervasive rise of the modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960s classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of tech no logy utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively shaped by the means we use to communicate. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media ‘global village’, have proved decades ahead of their time.” (from the back cover)

Originally published in 1967 by Bantam Books
Produced by Jerome Agel
Publisher Penguin, 2008
ISBN 9780141035826
159 pages

Wikipedia

The Medium is the Massage (English, 1967/2008, 10 MB, updated on 2017-4-24)
El medio es el masaje (Spanish, trans. León Mirlas, 1969, 10 MB, added on 2015-1-8)
O meio são as massa-gens (Portuguese, trans. Ivan Pedro de Martins, 1969, 16 MB, added on 2015-1-8)