Cornell University Press
The Medium Is Still the Message
About this book
The Medium Is Still the Message presents Marshall McLuhan, history's foremost philosopher of media, as the indispensable guide for understanding the impact of technologies. McLuhan (1911-1980) shows that media are not simply tools of communication: they create new environments with transformational effects on politics, economics, culture, identity, religion, and nature. Grant N. Havers argues that McLuhan's key insight--"the medium is the message"--is even more relevant today as humanity grapples with the unintended effects of new media.
As McLuhan demonstrated, a lack of understanding about the power of media technologies allows these entities to become idols that enslave their makers. At the same time, they encourage human beings to act like gods who can reinvent reality itself, all the while leading to the decline of literacy, the weakening of democracy, the resurgence of tribalism within the global village, and the elusive search for identity in cyberspace. The Medium Is Still the Message ultimately offers good news: using McLuhan's insights, human beings can escape the technological cave that they have fashioned for themselves.
Author / Editor information
Grant N. Havers is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Trinity Western University. He is the author of Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy and Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love. Havers and his family make their home in Langley, British Columbia.
Reviews
Havers delivers intellectual rigor without academic clutter and makes a persuasive case that understanding media environments is essential if we are to remain intellectually independent.
---Havers is to be commended for making sense of an author whom I have never enjoyed reading because of his diffuse writing style and his tendency to jump from one subject to another.
---Havers resurrects McLuhan's theories and ideas about the media by presenting them in an accessible manner without sacrificing philosophical depth to understand the digital world in which we live.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. A Biography
11 -
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2. Understanding and Misunderstanding Media
23 -
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3. Making History through Media
36 -
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4. Rear-View Mirror Politics
49 -
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5. Mother Goose and Peter Pan Executives
64 -
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6. New Media Are Nature
82 -
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7. The Divided Global Village
95 -
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8. The Retrieval of the Book
110 -
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9. The Electric Cave
126 -
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10. Surviving the Apocalypse
145 -
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Conclusion
161 -
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Notes
163 -
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Bibliography
185 -
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Index
199
