2001

  • Abel, Richard. “Marshall McLuhan: ‘A Master of Academic Grandstanding.'”Logos 12.3 (2001): 138-42.

 

“Coming now to the thrust of Lorimer’s essay, I am pleased that he acknowledges, by way of opening his rebuttal, that McLuhan’s writings are”… difficult to fathom and that his contribution is difficult to articulate … he bombarded the reader with fairly obscure and relatively undigested factoids… [because] they were merely derivations of a never fully developed system of ideas.” Lorimer seems to have had the same difficulties with McLuhan’s writings as those of us who think there is nothing to fathom – save to understand that we are dealing with a master of academic grandstanding and theater, who cobbled together a miscellany of empty tautologies, cast in bits and pieces of language filched wholesale from a hodgepodge of others’ work and writings; and absent of any coherent intellectual structure” (138-9).

 

  • Richard Abel, “Marshall McLuhan Revisited.” Logos 12.1 (2001): 12-19.

“Much of this continuing currency of McLuhan’s assertions and pronouncements must be attributed to the fact that he was an iconographic figure sufficiently in advance of many of the defining social changes which have characterized the last generation of the 20th century and the radical devaluation of our cultural inheritance. He was a precursor, or Pied Piper, of several leading trends of the last three-and-a-half decades. His public posture was well established in limited militant circles by the early 1960s. His The Gutenberg Galaxy appeared in 1962 but initially had little impact. But by 1964, his Understanding the Media, which some hold to be his most important and influential book, was published to great acclaim and enjoyed substantial sales” (13).

 

  • Belle, Jeff. “McLuhan Redux: Is Content King or Commodity?” EContent 24.5 (2001): 38-43.

 

“Some have cited McLuhan’s thesis as an insight into the elevation of distribution over content as a means to attract the attention and dollars of consumers. Because they interpret it to mean that the Internet will bring an end to mass media and subordinate the role of content – that is, create an environment in which content is a by-product of communication, rather than communication resulting from content – these pundits foresee the long-term best use of the Internet as little more than a host for relatively content-free financial transactions and direct marketing” (40).

 

  • Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy . Montreal, XYZ Pub, 2001.

 

  • Hamilton, E.. “A Shout Out to Marsh [review].” Canadian Literature 169 (Summer 2001): 138-40.

 

  • Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Globalization . Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. 57-77.

 

“We do know that the media do not transport public memory innocently. They shape it in their very structure and form. And here – in line with Marshall McLuhan’s well-worn point that the medium is the message – it becomes highly significant that the power of our most advanced electronics depends entirely on quantities of memory: Bill Gates may embody just the latest incarnation of the old American ideal – more is better. But ‘more is now measured in memory bytes and in the power to recycle the past. Witness Gates’s much advertised purchase of the largest collection of original photographs ever. In the move from the photographs ever. In the move from the photograph to its digital recycling, Walter Benjamin’s art of mechanical reproduction (photography) has regained the aura of originality. Which goes to show that Benjamin’s famous argument about the loss or decay of the aura in modernity was always only half of the story; the argument omitted that modernization itself created the auratic effect to begin with. Today, it is digitalization that makes the ‘original’ photograph auratic.” (67)

 

  • Janelle, D.G.. “Globalization, the Internet Economy, and Canada.” Canadian Geographer 45.1 (2001): 48-53.

“McLuhan’s coining of ‘global village’ became a mantra for advocates of alternative lifestyles and social systems. The seemingly geographical absurdity of merging ‘village’ with ‘global’ poses an enticing gestalt of geographical interpretation that is equally but differently at ease with the conceptions of Walt Disney or Conrad Black as it is with the champions of ‘place’ in current social-science and humanities thinking. This apparent contradiction opens the concept and geographical reality of ‘Canada’ to exploitation by the new digital economy, a subject that warrants discussion in any overview of Canada’s economy.” (48)

 

  • Jung, Hwa Jol. “The Posthumous McLuhan.” Rivista di Studi Italiani 19.2 (2001): 27-47.

 

  • Kostelanetz, Richard. Three Canadian Geniuses: Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye . Toronto: Colombo & Co., 2001.

 

  • Lorimer, Rowland. “Marshall McLuhan: Media Genius.” Logos 12.2 (2001): 78- 85.

“With regard to the evolving world, just as television convinces us by parading a miscellany of experts and images before our eyes, interrupted by commentators (who are witnesses to the case being built) and advertisers (who hawk products that are not jarring within the mindset television encourages), so McLuhan was inclined to bombard the reader with fairly obscure and relatively undigested factoids and analysis. These he asserted to be evidence from which he drew seemingly quite outlandish conclusions. But they weren’t outlandish. They were merely derivations of a never fully developed system of ideas that McLuhan was forever striving to articulate. His system of thought was never fully developed, in part because, like a poet, novelist or artist, he appeared to be possessed by his vision, and his attempts to explain it were not explanations but further applications. His ‘probes’ were flashes of insight that at times were right on the mark and at other times completely off base. But they did reflect an innovative and profoundly significant perspective.” (79)

 

  • Maloney, Timothy S. “Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Glenn Gould: Three Canadian Legacies to the World of Ideas.” Australian Canadian Studies: A Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ACS) 19.2 (2001): 49-79.

 

  • Neubauer, Paul. Marshall McLuhan and the 1960s New Media Debate: A Summary of Effects . Ed. Jurgen Heideking et al. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2001.

 

  • Ozawa, Terutomo et.al.. “The Internet Revolution, The ‘McLuhan’ Stage of Catch-Up, and Institutional Reforms in Asia.” Journal of Economic Issues 35.2 (2001): 289-98.

“The McLuhan phase of growth is currently in the making by the ongoing development of information technologies into a coherent whole. Unlike the previous linear and sector-differentiating progression of structural upgrading in which a new independent industry (say, automobiles) becomes dominant as a leading sector without much affecting yesteryear’s leading sector (say, textiles), the McLuhan industries impact all the ‘older generation’ (Old Economy) industries in the areas of management, production, procurement, distribution, and customer services. In fact, the non-manufacturing, transactions-intensive sectors such as finance, telecommunications, distribution, and government services are the ones most dramatically impacted.” (292)

 

  • Theall, Donald. “Marshall McLuhan , Canadian Schizo-Jansenist and Pseudo- Joycean Precursor of and Preparer for the Dissemination of French Theory in North America.” French Theory in America . Eds. Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen. New York: Routledge, 2001.

 

  • Donald Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan . Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s UP, 2001.
  • Voithofer, Rick. “Digital McLuhan [review].” Teachers College Record 103.1 (2001): 138-40.

“Like many media scholars, Levinson often paints in broad strokes as he discusses the social and cultural effects of the information age. What is lost in such depictions are significant if one believes that culture (including popular culture) takes on its meaning in the specificity of local contexts. A reading of cultural studies media scholars like Stuart Hall and David Morley alongside Digital McLuhan would provide a valuable contrast to the cultural silences that exist in the book. Despite these structured absences, Digital McLuhan is a valuable book to anyone who uses media to teach. It offers thought-provoking insights into how the information millennium is redefining our understandings of education, work, play, and art.” (140)

 

 

  • Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” Gray Room 4 (2001): 83-122.

“Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan met for the first time after boarding the New Hellas in Athens for an eight-day boat trip around the Greek Islands. The two gurus of the electronic age had been invited on the trip, along with thirty-two other leading intellectuals from fourteen countries, by Constantine Doxiadis, a Greek architect and urban planner. The idea was to have a ‘symposion,’ a radical mixing of intellectual activity and sensual pleasure as the boat traveled from island to island. … Even if the others on the boat regarded McLuhan as ‘outlandish,’ as he later wrote to a friend, his arguments had a marked effect. … When Doxiadis sent his letter of invitation to McLuhan … he said that he had just read The Gutenberg Galaxy of the year before and saw ideas in it that are ‘essential’ to a reconsideration of human settlements. … Once on board, McLuhan used the event to explore the architectural implications of his work. The boat became an amplifier for his argument that electronics is actually biological, an organic system with particular effects. The evolution of technology is the evolution of the human body. Networks of communication, like any technology, are prosthetic extensions of the body. They are new body parts and
constitute a new organism, a new spatial system, a new architecture” (84-86).