- Connolly, Paul. “Letters of Marshall McLuhan [review].” Commonweal 116 Oct 6 1989): 537-538:
538: “‘What if he’s right?’ is ultimately the wrong response to Marshall McLuhan. His genius was for asking questions, not finding sufficient answers. McLuhan considered himself an empirical scientists, not a dialectician; a satirist, not a moralist; a man of percepts, not viewpoints: ‘I don’t believe in shoulding on people.’ His peculiar approach to all things modern, he rightly observed, was ‘to enter via the ground [of media] rather than the figure [of content].'”
- Heyer, Paul. “Probing a Legacy: McLuhan’s Communications / History 25 Years After.” Canadian Journal of Communication 14.4-5 (1989): 30-45.
- Huyssen, Andreas. “In the Shadow of McLuhan: Jean Baudrillard’s Theory of Simulation.” Assemblage 10 (1989): 7-17
15: “Of course, Baudrillard is fairly far from McLuhan when he ascribes to the masses a full understanding of McLuhan’s basic proposition about the media and, simultaneously, a conscious resistance to the media. But then he did not stick with this position for very long. Certainly, with ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ any notion of resistance has disappeared, and we are left with a monolithic vision of contemporary culture that seems evermore like a binary reversal of McLuhan, but McLuhan nevertheless. And in Les Stratégies fatales, McLuhan’s ‘euphoria’ comes back as the ‘ecstasy of communication,’ which strikes me as a blend of Dionysian chaos with American ‘more is better.’ Technological determinism runs amok, transforming itself into a phantasmagoria of the screen.”
- James, Robert and William Moriarty. “Where Have You Gone, Marshall McLuhan?” Curriculum Review 28 (May 1989): 30-1.
30: “In the early 1970s, ‘media literacy’ courses were grafted onto the regular curriculums of elementary and high schools nationwide. The drive to make kids media literate came from an awakening among educators to the prominent role media play in shaping children’s perceptions of the world. For the hard-followers of Marshall McLuhan, it was a field day.
But in today’s classrooms, where teachers are ferociously caught up in the return to basics, media studies are almost entirely absent, having been packed away with the sensitivity training of teachers. Despite media’s ever greater intrusion into students’ lives, what little remains in the way of media training is usually offered only as a brief elective course for high school seniors.”
- Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger . Toronto: Random House, 1989.
- McCartney, George. “The Clue in McLuhan [review].” National Review 41.12 (1989): 46-48.
47-48: “McLuhan reasoned that, for all its manifest achievements, phonetic literacy needed a corrective, and television might provide it. Although he thought the medium might have the benefit of bringing us literally to our senses. His argument is more than a little ingenious. Television’s low-definition image, he pointed out, requires the viewer’s sensory participation to complete its pictures. We don’t just watch television, he argued, we get in touch with it. Of course, he didn’t think television would replace literacy, but it might awaken us from the spell of typographic abstraction, helping to close the alienating distance between sign and referent, the individual and reality.”
- Morrow, Lance. “Welcome to the Global Village.” Time 133 (May 29 1989): 96.
- Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology / Scizophrenia / Electric Speech . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P: 1989.
89-90: ” Understanding Media develops a hermeneutics of despair, linking up the rapport to technology with a grammar of shock absorption and loss. As if the work of technological desire encapsulated an electric version of the work of mourning, McLuhan continues: ‘There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock. A person suddenly deprived of loved ones and a person who drops a few feet unexpectedly will both register shock. Both the loss of family and a physical fall are extreme instances of amputations of the self.’ . [B]oth Freud and McLuhan share the project of elaborating a techné of autoamputation.”
- Sanderson, George and Frank McDonald, eds.. Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message . Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1989.
- Watson, Wilfred. “Let’s Murder Clytemnestra According to the Principles of Marshall McLuhan.” Plays at the Iron Bridge, or the Autobiography of Tom Horror . Ed. Shirley Neuman. Edmonton: Longspoon NeWest P, 1989. 341-428.
343: “[T]he world of scientific explanation, in which explanation explains and explanation remains, ad infinitum, and ad absurdum, has become reduced to the cliché of the TV screen; a fact proved empirically, McLuhan himself noted, when the first TV camera was set up on the moon, and began to take pictures of the home-planet.” (343)
- Wollheim, Peter. “Photography and Narrative.” The Zone of Conventional Practice and Other Real Stories . Ed. Cheryl Simon. Montreal: Galerie Optica, 1989. 59-67.
61: “Art photography’s modern ascendancy also coincided with Marshall McLuhan’s influential attacks on what he saw as the linear, literal, alienating features of ‘typographic man'” (61).