Nicholas Carr writes:
Marshall McLuhan is back. The 1960s icon’s theories about “electric media” have new resonance now that the internet is becoming our all-purpose conduit for news, information and entertainment. ¶ McLuhan was an obscure Canadian academic until the mid-Sixties, when his best-selling book Understanding Media turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon. His playfully radical ideas and deliberately disjointed prose perfectly reflected the spirit of the times, when the air was filled with revolutionary rhetoric and pot smoke. Tom Wolfe, in a 1965 article, suggested that McLuhan might be ''the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.'' ¶ McLuhan’s central thesis, encapsulated in the famous phrase “the medium is the message,” was that the technologies through which we take in information—the media, broadly defined—become “extensions” of our bodies, exerting a profound influence over how we think and act. When an important new medium arrives, it can reshape who we are as individuals and as a society. ...
Link: Rough Type. Version in the Guardian. --Dennis
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