Summary
Douglas Coupland: Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan, the famous social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is today primarily remembered as the author of the aphoristic slogan he devised to explain the emergence of a new world of global communication: "The medium is the message." Fifty years later, McLuhan's predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of "electronic interdependence" have become a reality - in a certain sense, the only reality - of our time.
Douglas Coupland whose cult book Generation X was a "McLuhanian" representation of culture in fictional form, wrote a concise biography of a media theorist who interprets the life and work of the man he deals with from the inside. As a fellow Canadian, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the incredible prophet McLuhan, whose vision of a global village – now known as the Internet – has come to fruition in the 21st century. As Coupland himself explains, "Marshall's second cliché, the 'global village', is a kind of paraphrase of the fact that electronic technologies are an extension of the human central nervous system and the fact that the collective neural connections of our planet will create a unique amorphous, confused, semi-conscious metacommunity that functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week." We can really agree with the line that McLuhan utters in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall (which is also the subtitle of the book): "You have no idea about my work!" By reading Coupland's Marshall McLuhan we can at least slightly correct that injustice.
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