Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Extending the visionary early work of the late Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village, one of his last collaborative efforts, applies that vision to today's worldwide, integrated electronic network. When McLuhan's groundbreaking Understanding Media was published in 1964, the media as we know it today did not exist. But McLuhan's argument, that the technological extensions of human consciousness were racing ahead of our ability to understand their consequences, has never been more compelling. And if the medium is the message, as McLuhan maintained, then the message is becoming almost impossible to decipher. In The Global Village, McLuhan and co-author Bruce R. Powers propose a detailed conceptual framework in terms of which the technological advances of the past two decades may be understood. At the heart of their theory is the argument that today's users of technology are caught between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand there is what they refer to as Visual Space--the linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world; on the other hand there is Acoustic Space--the holistic, qualitative reasoning of the East. The medium of print, the authors argue, fosters and preserves the perception of Visual Space; but, like television, the technologies of the data base, the communications satellite, and the global media network are pushing their users towards the more dynamic, "many-centered" orientation of Acoustic Space. The authors warn, however, that this movement towards Acoustic Space may not go smoothly. Indeed, McLuhan and Powers argue that with the advent of the global village--the result of worldwide communications--these two worldviews "are slamming into each other at the speed of light," asserting that "the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously." Employing McLuhan's concept of the Tetrad--a device for predicting the changes wrought by new technologies--the authors analyze this collision of viewpoints. Taking no sides, they seek to do today what McLuhan did so successfully twenty-five years ago--to look around the corner of the coming world, and to help us all be prepared for what we will find there.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is not a revised or updated version of McLuhan's Understanding Media ( LJ 6/1/64) or even War and Peace in the Global Village (LJ 11/1/68). It was written, according to Powers, between 1974 and 1980 (McLuhan died in 1980) and ``put together'' between 1976 and 1984. McLuhan's thesis has always been that electronic technologies have been altering and reconstituting people in ways they don't understand and causing them to lose their private identities. This book probes the same theme from different angles, but with the same McLuhanesque all-over-the-place reasoning. Powers seems to have had a leavening effect on the master's breathless prose and extravagant presentation. The book should provoke people to think, if nothing else. For McLuhan collectors. See also Philip Marchand's Marshall McLuhan and George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald's retrospective, reviewed in this issue, p. 75.-- A.J. Anderson, G.S.L.I.S., Simmons Coll., Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Weighted with technobabble, McLuhan's fervent forecast of a computer-linked global village flies in the face of political realities: ``Mass, spontaneous electronic referendums will sweep across continents. The concept of nationalism will fade. . . . '' A ``new tribalism'' with ``centers everywhere and margins nowhere'' will flourish, and books will be obsolete, or nearly so, by the 21st century, the authors of this futurist tract further assert. McLuhan collaborated on this study with Powers, a communications professor at Niagara University in New York, who completed the manuscript after the media guru's death. Contrasting the ``visual space'' mediated by sequential, left-brain thought processes with the ``acoustic space'' called into being by the pattern-producing right brain hemisphere, the authors put forth catchy but unsubstantiated generalizations about the Oriental mind, Russians, the U.S. economy, entrepreneurship and electronic media. McLuhan's concept of the ``tetrad,'' a four-part intuitive structure rooted in figure-ground relationships, is used here as a predictive tool to gauge the impact of emerging information technologies. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Taking their titles from phrases that McLuhan coined and popularized during the 1960s, two new books cover the life and thought of the late media guru. In his introduction to The Global Village, the second of the two books, Powers notes that McLuhan (who died in 1980) had intended to update his 1964 book Understanding Media by presenting a model for studying the structural impact of technologies on society. After research during the late 1970s, McLuhan and Powers agreed that a tetradic structure (four-part metaphor) could be used to assess the global effects--positive and negative--likely to occur in the next century. To enhance their analysis, they also posit two dichotomous types of space--visual (left-brained, linear, quantitative, western) and acoustic (right-brained, patterned, qualitative, eastern)--and proceed to explain how world culture is repositioning itself to accept the new "mode of the dynamically many-centered." Mind-boggling as it seems, the authors' point is simple: avoid global conflict through simultaneous understanding. Glossary; notes; bibliography. Those who would rather read about McLuhan's ideas than struggle to understand them will appreciate Marchand's well-crafted biography of the Canadian intellectual who was once his teacher. Based on his subject's diaries and correspondence as well as interviews with students and colleagues, Marchand depicts an ambitious, stimulating, and witty English professor who was frequently too preoccupied to give either his students or his six children the attention they desired. Tracing the growth of McLuhan's conviction that all media have a linguistic structure from the 1930s--when as a Cambridge student he was influenced by I. A. Richards, Ezra Pound, and other proponents of the New Criticism--to the 1960s (when he became an international celebrity of sorts), Marchand maintains that "the medium is the message" was simply an aphoristic version of an earlier assertion that any medium is capable of imposing its own assumptions on those who use it. Devoted to both his Roman Catholic faith and his egghead status, McLuhan was accused of being pseudoscientific and incomprehensible: when members of an audience complained that his lecture was unintelligible, he replied, "You don't like those ideas? I've got others." Notes, bibliography; to be indexed. --Paula Sedor

Kirkus Book Review

A quarter century ago, media guru McLuhan (d. 1980) wrote his famous Understanding Media. Now, in a posthumous volume cowritten by McLuhan's friend Powers (Communications Studies/Niagara U.), the premises of that work are updated. This collaboration stems from research undertaken by the authors at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. Their analysis of the worldwide impact of video-related technologies takes the myth of Narcissus (central to Understanding Media) a step further. McLuhan was struck by the fact that when men first went to the moon, we expected photographs of craters but, instead, the quintessential symbol of that adventure was the dramatic picture of earth--ourselves: ""All of us who were watching had an enormous reflexive response. We 'outered' and 'innered' at the same time. We were on earth and the moon simultaneously."" The authors refer to this kind of moment as a ""resonating interval""--""the true action in the event was not on earth or on the moon, but rather in the airless void between. . ."" In their analysis, this resonating interval represents an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space. The distinction between the two ""spaces"" marks the major premise here, with visual space representing the old traditions of Western Civilization--left-brain-oriented, linear, quantitative reasoning--and acoustic space representing right-brain, pattern-producing, qualitative reasoning. Because of electronic communications, the authors believe, these two mind-sets are ""slamming into each other at the speed of light."" While most societies view themselves through the past, usually a century behind, present-day changes occur so rapidly that this ""rearview mirror"" doesn't work anymore. By use of what they call the ""tetrad,"" the authors contend that they can postulate four stages in any invention or trend to determine what the final result will be--what it will ""flip over"" into (e.g., money flipped over to credit cards; the telephone to ""ominpresence."" as in teleconferencing; cable TV should flip over to home broadcasting; electronic-funds transfer should flip over to ""an intense state of credit-worthiness as pure status""). Dense, heavily technological writing--but with the occasional insight that reminds us of what once brought such renown to McLuhan. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

A poetry professor turned media theorist---or media guru, as some in the press called him at the time---Marshall McLuhan startled television watchers during the 1960's with the notion that the medium they were enthralled by was doing more than transmitting messages---it was the message: Its rapid-fire format, mixing programs and advertisements, conveyed as much as---or more than---any single broadcast element.

McLuhan grew up in the prairie country of the Canadian West and studied English at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University. As television entered a period of huge growth during the 1950's, McLuhan, then a college professor, became interested in advertising. He thought of it as something to be taken seriously as a new culture form, beyond its obvious capability of selling products. That interest led to his increasing speculation about what media did to audiences.

In his unpredictable modern poetry classes at the University of Toronto, he spoke more and more of media. The students he taught were the television generation, the first to grow up with the medium. Many were fascinated by McLuhan's provocative observations that a medium of communication radically alters the experience being communicated. A society, he said, is shaped more by the style than by the content of its media. Thus, the linear, sequential style of printing established a linear, sequential style of thinking, in which one thing is considered after another in orderly fashion: it shaped a culture in which (objective) reason predominated and experience was isolated, compartmentalized, and repeatable. In contrast, the low-density images of television, composed of a mosaic of light and dark dots, established a style of response in which it is necessary to unconsciously reconfigure the dots immediately in order to derive meaning from them. It has shaped a culture in which (subjective) emotion predominates and experience is holistic and unrepeatable. Since television (and the other electronic media) transcends space and time, the world is becoming a global village---a community in which distance and isolation are overcome. McLuhan was crisp and assured in his pronouncements and impatient with those who failed to grasp their import.

McLuhan's most famous saying, "the medium is the message," was explicated in the first chapter of his most successful book, "Understanding Media," published in 1966 and still in print. It sold very well for a rather abstruse book and brought McLuhan widespread attention in intellectual circles. The media industry responded by seeking his advice and enthusiastically disseminating his ideas in magazines and on television. These ideas caused people to perceive their environment, particularly their media environment, in radically new ways. It was an unsettling experience for some, liberating for others.

Though McLuhan produced some useful insights, he was given to wild generalizations and flagrant exaggerations. Some thought him a charlatan, and he always felt himself an outcast at the university, at least partly because of his disdain for print culture and opposition to academic conventions. He never seemed quite as energetic after an operation in 1967 to remove a huge brain tumor, but he continued to work and teach until he suffered a stroke in 1979. He died a year later. Though today his writings are not discussed as much by the general public, his thesis is still considered valid and his ideas have become widely accepted.

(Bowker Author Biography)