Unbuttoned McLuhan! An intimate exploration of Marshall McLuhan's ideas in his own words
In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published -- often in collaboration with others -- a series of books that established his reputation as the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. It was he who observed that "the medium is the message" and who tossed off dozens of other equally memorable phrases from "the global village" and "pattern recognition" to "feedback" and "iconic" imagery.
McLuhan was far more than a pithy-phrase maker, however. He foresaw -- at a time when the personal computer was a teckie fantasy -- that the world would be brought together by the internet. He foresaw the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology. He understood, before any of his contemporaries, the consequences of the revolution that television and the computer were bringing about....