Marshall McLuhan Is Back From the Dustbin of History
By ALEXANDER STILLE
FROM SATURDAY'S TIMES
Until recently, the media guru Marshall McLuhan appeared to be a dated artifact 
of 1960's culture, but McLuhan has emerged to become a pop icon of the Internet 
age.
(Free registration required)(Full story at....
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/14/technology/14MCLU.html

"...in the last several years McLuhan has emerged from the dustbin of history to become a pop icon of the Internet age. Wired magazine lists him as its patron saint, a flurry of books with titles like "Digital McLuhan
" present him in a new light, and a generation grappling with the transforming 
effects of cyberspace, cell phones and virtual reality has begun to see him not 
as out of date but ahead of his time.
"Everyone thought that McLuhan was talking about TV, but what he was really 
talking about was the Internet ? two decades before it appeared," Kevin Kelly, 
the executive editor of Wired, is quoted as saying on the jacket of "Digital 
McLuhan," a recent book by Paul Levinson, a professor of communications at 
Fordham University.
"When I first came on the scene, in 1990, no one talked about McLuhan ? it was 
as if he had never existed, and when I spoke about him there was no traction," 
Camille Paglia, professor of English at the University of the Arts in 
Philadelphia, said in an interview. "Now his name is mentioned everywhere. Now 
that all these young people are spending time on the Internet, there is a real 
ferment of interest in him."..."

"...He also predicted the coming of "the global village" and insisted that electronic technology would decentralize power and information, allowing people to live in smaller clusters far from major urban centers while
 having the same access to information. "My main theme is the extension of the 
nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with 5,000 
years of mechanical technology," he wrote in 1964.
His idea that new media would break the tyranny of print culture ? with its 
emphasis on rational, linear thinking and restore a richer, sensory balance ? 
appealed to the Woodstock generation and was welcomed by counterculture figures 
like John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman. McLuhan rapidly became an international 
celebrity: he was the subject of cartoons in The New Yorker and a long 
interview in Playboy magazine, and his name was often bandied about on the hit 
television show "Laugh-In." In 1965 Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of McLuhan 
called "What if He Is Right?" in which he raised the possibility that McLuhan 
might be "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and 
Pavlov."..."

"...Writing when the personal computer was nearly 20 years in the future, 
McLuhan showed an uncanny understanding of what would become the information 
age. "Electric light is pure information," he wrote. "The General Electric 
Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs 
and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it 
is in the business of moving information." Written more than 30 years before e-
commerce, this was hardly a common insight in 1964....."




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