- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2005.
“Our increasing interconnectedness-and our growing awareness of it-has not, of course, made us into denizens of a single community, the proverbial ‘global village.’ Everyone knows you cannot have face-to-face relations with six billion people. But you cannot have-to-face relations with ten million or a million or a hundred thousand people (with your fellow Swazis or Swahilis or Swedes) either; and we humans have long had practice in identifying, in nations, cities, and towns, with groups on this grander scale. . And so we return to that recently much bruited idea of the cosmopolitan. A cosmopolitan should-etymologically, at least-be someone who thinks that the world is, so to speak, our shared hometown, reproducing something very like the self-conscious oxymoron of the ‘global village.'” (216-7)
- Browne, Stephanie. “See, e.g., Hildegarde, Fatima, Blake, McLuhan [poem].”The American Poetry Review 34.2 (2005): 3.
“The ditto sheet recopied each year was your teacher’s piece of wisdom.
And it passed into e-mail bromides, borne long ago from broadsides
And the tales of palpitatin’ wives.
And all these lessons have a piece of practicality and a piece of magic:
“Stop acting deliberately and start acting tragic,” or
“Stop acting tragic and stop acting deliberately,” they confide.
No, no, they don’t go back to the Pleistocene.
This is about the mind. Is it about the spirit?
There is kitsch spirituality as well as kitsch thinking, Bozolein.” (3)
- Conway, Flo and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (N.Y.: Basic Books, 2005)
“[I]n the summer of 1950, Donald Theall, a young American graduate student at the university of Toronto, introduced his English professor, Marshall McLuhan, to Wiener’s work and to the new thinking of the cybernetics group. Theall handed McLuhan copies of Cybernetics and The Human use of Human Beings and witnessed McLuhan’s reaction. ‘The relevance of Wiener in McLuhan’s mind had to do with Wiener’s image of the communications network as the contemporary image for the ‘age of communications and control,’ Theall recalled. Wiener’s ideas stimulated McLuhan’s thinking and spurred him on to build ‘a foundation for a contemporary theory of artistic communication’ that became a conduit for the flow of cybernetic ideas into art, literature, and the whole of popular culture.” (277)
- Flahiff, F. T.. Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson.Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2005.
“Sheila, Wilfred [Watson], and I had . talked of a volume of essays on McLuhan. I had believed in his importance as a teacher of literature, his contribution to literary studies as a critic, and his influence on students had been so overshadowed by his role as media guru as to have been lost sight of. . Sheila in particular became excited by the prospect of broadening the concerns of such a volume to include Marshall’s influence on the practical as well as the fine arts, on painting, poetry, music, and cinema, certainly, but also on book design and architecture, on city planning and historiography.” (279-80)
- Gane, Nicholas. “Radical Post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.3 (2003): 25-41.
“McLuhan drops Shannon and Weaver’s focus on the mathematics of information, but at the same time follows the basic line of their argument by prioritizing analysis of the technology of message transmission over interpretation of its content (a move most media analysis is still reluctant to make today; see Kittler, 1996b). In this way, McLuhan’s famous declaration that the ‘medium is the message’ develops the thinking of Shannon and Weaver (for whom there is no real message, only a signal, see Hayles, 1999: 18) by asserting the role of the channel (which Weaver also calls a medium) in shaping the content of what is transmitted (rather than vice versa). It is this transformative power which, for McLuhan, is the real message of technology: ‘the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (1964: 8). But McLuhan also gives Shannon and Weaver’s communication system a further twist, for the information source (the sender) and final destination of communication are dropped from his account.” (27)
- Gu, Baotong. “[Understanding Me].” Technical Communication Quarterly 14.2 (2005): 230-5.
“To many people in the field of technical communication, Marshall McLuhan may not have been a household name, but few could have escaped exposure to the impact of his work on new media and especially to some of his most famous coinages: “hot” and “cool” media, “the global village,” and “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s boldly insightful works on communication media and technologies, including The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy(1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967), provide us with a rather comprehensive picture of his theory on media. However, it is Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (2003), the latest addition to the McLuhan collection, that brings us into a more direct tactile touch and an involving dialog with, to borrow McLuhan’s own term, this great, prophetic thinker. The collection features nothing but original lectures and interviews, allowing the reader to discover the inner workings of McLuhan’s mind.” (230)
- Krapp, Peter. “Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 70-93
“The global village is nothing but a big forget-together of those who tell the story of the global village to each other. Version control, authentication, and data integrity are not among the core features of this structure: it is marked by hearsay, rumor, storytelling, which goes against the command-and-control efficiencies of the administration of power.” (87)
- Marchessault, Janine. Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media . London: Sage, 2005.
“Television as extension and prosthetic reates a sense at once of loss and plenitude-the more it keeps you in touch , alleges McLuhan, the less you feel. A sense of amputation and the numbness produced by amputation are the necessary costs of this experience of unity.” (191)
- Mielo, Gary. “The Medium is the Moblog.” Etc . 62.1 (2005): 29-35.
- W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images(Chicago: U Chicago P, 2005)
“Thirty years after the death of Marshall McLuhan, the great pioneer of media studies, the field still does not have its own identity. Symptomatic of this is the need to constantly overturn McLuhan, to recite all his mistakes and bemoan his naive predictions of the end of labor, the emergence of a peaceful ‘global village,’ and the development of a new planetary consciousness, a kind of wired ‘world spirit.’ Contemporary media theory, as if in reaction against McLuhan’s optimisim, is driven by an obsession with war machines (Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio) and traces every technical innovation to the arts of coercion, aggression, destruction, surveillance, and propaganda spectacle. Or it is enveloped in a presentist rhetoric that takes the Internet and the age of digital information as the horizon of its interests (Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich). Or it focuses exclusively on the so-called mass media (television and print journalism) as a uniquely modern invention that can be rigorously distinguished from more traditional media. …
As McLuhan became a bigger media star, appearing on the TV programs The Dick Cavett Show and Laugh-In and in the film Annie Hall and consulting with American corporations about new product lines, his academic reputation hit the skids. He was quickly supplanted by a new media oracle in the early eighties, the rising start of the more politically correct and safely posthumous Walter Benjamin. … The fall of McLuhan and the rise of Benjamin is a story that remains to be told in the history of media studies. McLuhan’s cheery ‘global village’ optimism and his mystical visions of a group mind did not play well in the era of poststructuralist suspicion and a predominantly Left-oriented media studies.” (206; 219-21)
- Robinson, Wendy. “Marshall McLuhan Reconsidered: Review of Reprinted Editions, Previously Unpublished Work, and Two Tributes.” New Media and Society 7.2 (2005): 271-280.
“Although the zeitgeist of the 1960s often looked at the ‘global village’ through rose-coloured glasses, McLuhan was not convinced that a suffusion of electric media would encourage world peace. He viewed the media effects on and tribal arousal of what today is associated with ‘globalization’ as potentially terrifying. And considering his willingness to engage with the business aspects of the culture industry, McLuhan did not publicly scorn commerce. He was interested enduringly in what today is called ‘consumption studies’, and surely enabled his own commodification. In his later years, increasingly recondite, McLuhan often wrote on the sensorium (a merging of mind, senses and electric media), the ‘bicameral mind’ (Jaynes, 1990[1976]), and figure/ground or pattern recognition. These motifs appear and reappear through the new and reissued titles.” (275)
Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)
10-11: “The all-embracing or ‘total’ history of the socialization of the sense of the kind envisaged by Marx, and to some extent by Benjamin, has still not advanced beyond the initial stages. Such work as might be mentioned in this context consists for the most part of the numerous recent studies of the ‘scopic regime,’ or history of the gaze, which are much indebted to Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and above all to Michel Foucault (1926-1984). These mainly historically orientated special studies have sought to identify the social and political developments behind the rise of ‘new’ ways of seeing that have radically transformed this particular form of sense perception. With the sense of vision as their paradigm, they have shown how mutations of forms of perception are products of a complex, dynamic process that is determined both by the logic of political systems and by cultural and [11] economic factors.”