McLuhan Wiki



Welcome to the McLuhan Wiki
All about Marshall McLuhan's theories on media as presented in The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

McLuhan has been called "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov", and yet "few of the people who explicated his text fully understood what he was trying to say." If understanding media is in fact as important as McLuhan believed, new ways of accessing his insights are needed. This wiki is an attempt to do so.

McLuhan writes that media cannot be studied in a linear way; they must be studied with a more Eastern view of thought, setting out the answer at the beginning and then tracing and retracing the topic to provide insight. This can make it difficult for Western readers of his books (which are necessarily linear) to follow. A wiki such as this follows a nonlinear format. In particular, readers can look up information on topics that McLuhan mentions that are not yet familiar, to learn about them or at least to see when they will be addressed in more detail.

Sections

 * McLuhan's Works
 * Definition of Media
 * Types of Medium
 * People who have understood media
 * Cultures and how they respond differently to media
 * Predictions
 * Recommendations of what to do as a result of this understanding of media
 * Key concepts
 * The Medium is the Message
 * The Content of a medium is always another medium.
 * Acceleration and Reversal
 * Hot vs. Cool media
 * Extensions of Man, Amputation, and Closure
 * Somnambulism vs. Hallucination
 * The global village
 * Media as staples
 * Hybridization
 * Translation
 * The role of Art in responding to media
 * Challenges presented by media, and responses to them

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