- Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge and Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000)
9-10: “It was McLuhan who coined the term ‘surfing” in an electronic context in the early 1960s, thirty years before it came into general currency as use of the world wide web spread. McLuhan’s catchphrase from the same period, ‘the medium is the message,’ has resurfaced in the sociological bibliography of D. F. McKenzie and work on the history of the book by Roger Chartier in the assertion that ‘Forms effect [sic] meanings.'”
- Bernstein, Charles. “The Art of Immemorability.” A Book of the Book . Eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Stephen Clay. New York: Granary Books, 2000. 504-17.
“The distinction I am suggesting here is not unlike one that Marshall McLuhan makes in Understanding Media between the received and the new content of the emerging medium. The initial content of television was the product of the previous moving image medium, film (which, in turn, not only shaped the TV but also changed movies). In contrast, ‘live’ TV (initially broadcasts of sporting events but epitomized by live news broadcasts) is the best example of a distinct genre particular to the medium of television. If ‘live’ TV suggests a formal essence for the new medium of television, we might look at non-oral, non-speech-based forms of writing in order to identify the distinctly textual, rather than holdover or transcriptive, features of writing.” (506)
- Campbell, Robert. “Descending into the Maelstrom of the 21st Century with Marshall McLuhan.” Educational Technology 40.5 (2000): 18-27.
- Fishwick, Marshall. “The Video McLuhan [review].” Journal of Popular Culture 33.4 (2000): 161-3.
“The new technology, McLuhan believed, is not just affecting how we think, it’s altering our central nervous system. After four centuries of print culture, we are returning to a primitive tribalism–making a seamless web which will outmode nationalism and form a global village. We prefer to view life in the rear view mirror, but that view is gone forever. The medium is the message–there was the tag line that would follow him to and beyond the grave.” (162)
- Garnham, Nicholas. Modernity: Arguments About the Media and Social Theory . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
135: “Many scholars have cogently argued that the book as a form enabled the development of individual, private, and domestic appropriation, which itself helped to develop both the Kantian Enlightenment view of humans as intellectually autonomous and the revaluation of the relation between the private and domestic and the public, between fiction and the feminine on the one hand and male and the political on the other. It is this view that forms of consumption are in complex ways embodied in different forms and institutions, and that they in turn reinforce certain personal and social character traits, that is the rational core of McLuhan’s theories, which in their turn derive from studies of the ways in which the development of printing and reading and the shift from orality changed society and the individuals within it.”
- Goodheart, Eugene. “Marshall McLuhan Revisited.’ Partisan Review 67.1 (2000): 90-99.
- Hansen, Mark. Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing . Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2000.
“Far from living out the global embrace gleefully envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, then, we face a situation in which the prostheses we adopt to cognize and intervene in the technologically driven material complexification of the universe only seem to expand our experiential alientation.” (71)
- Horrocks, Christopher. Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality . Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2000.
66: “McLuhan’s version of disembodiment. cuts across superficial readings of the collectivism of the global village and the elevation of humans to a cosmic consciousness. For McLuhan, immersion in electronic media does not merely imply an elevation to a sublime state of global union, because his model incorporates the (admittedly undertheorised) conception that such immersion has a psychological and sensory impact that profoundly affects the ontological security of the individual.”
- Johnson, Brian. “Plastic Shaman in the Global Village: Understanding Media in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Etudes en Litterature Canadienne (SCL) 25.2 (2000): 24-49.
“Tracing the complicity of media and political systems in Empire and Communications, McLuhan’s intellectual mentor, Harold Innis, ‘explained the difference between the imperialistic military bureaucracy of Rome and the conservative priestly bureaucracy of Babylon in terms of the materials on which they wrote. The Babylonians used clay tablets which provided a permanent record of their culture and hence provided them with command over time. The Romans, on the other hand, wrote on an extremely portable medium, papyrus, which gave them command over space’ (Logan 84). It was not only the physicality of the medium that affected imperialism, however, but the development of the phonetic alphabet itself. For McLuhan, the one-way violence by which ‘any society possessing the alphabet can translate any adjacent cultures into its alphabetic mode’ was epitomized in the story of ‘The Greek King Cadmus, who introduced the phonetic alphabet to Greece, [and] who was said to have sown the dragon’s teeth and that they sprang up as armed men. (The dragon’s teeth may allude to old hieroglyphic forms)’ (McLuhan,Gutenberg 50). Two elements of media, the alphabet and paper, thus provided the necessary conditions for the development of Western imperialism.”
- Rogers, Everett. “The Extensions of Men: The Correspondence of Marshall McLuhan and Edward T. Hall.” Mass Communication & Society 3.1 (2000): 117-145.
- Skinner, David. “McLuhan’s World – And Ours.” The Public Interest 138 (Winter 2000): 52-64.
56: “What was happening to people under the influence of television, McLuhan pointed out, couldn’t be discovered at the library or in public records. The Dewey decimal system held few clues to the mysteries of post-print life. One had to look to oral culture for answers: The medium that Orson Welles, used to scare the bejabbers out of housewives in New York and New Jersey with his reading of The War of the Worlds had more to teach us than all the texts in the New York Public Library.”
- Tomaselli, Keyan G.. “Let There Be Hypermedia.: Shakespeare, McLuhan, and Electronic Consciousness.” Scrutiny 2 5.2 (2000): 54-58.
- Wark, McKenzie. “Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan.” Media International Australia 94 (2000): 89-96.
“Under no illusions about ancient Greek tribal life, [McLuhan] saw the village as riven by war and conflict, not peace and harmony.” (94)
- Wigley, Mark. “The Architectural Cult of Synchronization.” October 94 (Fall 2000): 31-61.
“Although McLuhan didn’t speak to the Independent Group until May 1962, they shared many influences with him, combining a similar sensitivity to mass culture with the technique of the ready-made picked up from Marcel Duchamp. From the first meeting, where Paolozzi used an epidiascope to show heterogeneous clippings from popular magazines, comics, postcards, and army manuals, they all assembled collages, scrap-books, tack boards, and slide shows of appropriated images that constantly evolved. They tried to avoid describing them as art works, even while taking the risk of monumentalizing them by exhibiting them. Paolozzi had been assembling his collages–which incorporated some of the very advertisements that McLuhan analyzes in his book–since the mid-’40s but had declined to see them as art, let alone exhibit them. The group’s overall mission was likewise to embrace popular imagery without petrifying it.”
- Wright, Julia. “The Medium, the Message and the Line in William Blake’s ‘Laocoön.” Mosaic 33.2 (June 2000): 101 -124.
102-103: “Through such works as Understanding Media , Marshall McLuhan has provoked an interest in the ways in which form, or medium, silently configure the reception of cultural artifacts. One concern of McLuhan’s, and of Blake’s, is the impact of the mass-produced book: ‘Printing changed learning and marketing process alike. The book was the first teaching machine and also the first mass-produced commodity. [. . .] The psychic and social consequences of print included an extension of its fissile and uniform character to the gradual homogenization of diverse regions’ ( 174, 175). In Blake’s quasi-mythology, this is the Book of Urizen : a massproduced text which homogenizes the reading public. This is a familiar subject in Blake studies and I do not wish to revisit it here; I want to emphasize instead the standardization of form implicit in such productions.”
- Viswanath, K. “Digital McLuhan [review].” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77.1 (2000): 195-7.
“Many scholars and intellectuals have expressed concern about the increasing blurring of boundaries between home and work in the contemporary post-industrial age. Levinson explores this idea in his chapter on ‘Serfs to Surf’ arguing that the PC is a means to both work and pleasure. He then extends his analysis to the impact of Internet on performance, productivity, and satisfaction. Lastly, he attempts at a prognosis of the Internet for the future drawing on McLuhan’s construct of the ‘Tetrad,’ the four laws of the media questioning whether each medium ‘enhances, obsolesces, retrieves or reverses’ aspects of our society and culture.”(196)
- Vogler, Thomas A. “When a Book is not a Book.” A Book of the Book . Eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Stephen Clay. New York: Granary Books, 2000. 448-466.
458-459: “There is a theory of technological determinism, popularized in a rather crude and utopian form by Marshall McLuhan, which teaches that many of our most cherished, most commonplace ideas and attitudes toward literature and literary production turn out to be the result of that particular form of information technology and technology of cultural memory that has provided the setting for them. This technology – that of the printed book and its close relations, which include the typed or printed page – engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text.
When ‘the book’ does engender such ‘notions,’ it does so not at the level of the idea, but at the level of techne and praxis. A book is not an idea; it is a structural mechanism with important functions. Its mechanism of turnable pages defines a sequence of spaces, each of which must be perceived at a different moment. A book is also a sequence of moments designed to produce a unified experience out of multiple sheets by binding them in a determined order. Thus our physical engagement with the book pre-enacts the structuring of subjectivity for which the book has long been a primary cultural agency. Unlike alteration or treatment, which operate on individual books as physical objects, book-objects can be ‘troped’ books, figurative constructs where ‘the book’ as generic cultural artifact is the subject for representation , imitation, or violation.”