An historical work of art. To me, personally, a curiosity. I would have liked to have taken a course for which it was a required text, decades back when it was more immediately relevant.

But it did alert me to [a:William Wordsworth|64845|William Wordsworth|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1288772244p2/64845.jpg]'s:

EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY

"WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you; 10
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

"The eye--it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will. 20

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

"--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may, 30
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,"
1798.

... which is not only cool, but provokes me to wonder if this were the inspiration for [a:Lewis Carroll|8164|Lewis Carroll|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1192735053p2/8164.jpg]' s 'Father William.'

I hate it when my review is above the global average but, come on! MCLUHAN!

"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." ( )

Only good if you don't take it as serious politics/cultural studies, and even then it's pretty ridiculous. A lot of it looks absurd in the context of the 40 odd years of technological and political. development since this was written. The idea that modern technology is particularly liberating, especially, doesn't look like much now. It's weird because he seems to make comments every so often which show the essential similarity between modern technology and older technology but he doesn't let it change his rather bold predictions of the coming massive societal changes due to technology. The text is written kind of confusingly a lot of the time. Overall it's just a bit crap.

The "art" aspect is pretty poor and I really don't appreciate stuff like mirror text.

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog." Really? Is there any reason to believe this at all?

"The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible." No reason to consider this true.

"In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore." First, "tribal societies"?? Lazy as hell. There's a lot of ideas about "primitive" society in this that are just claptrap. And second guilt is just as private. Like he regularly says that technology is making the world more connected and social yet the reality is that things haven't changed much in that respect and if anything we've become *more* atomised - the reams of analysis about neoliberalism bear this out.

"The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are." Very unpleasant "sheeple" style talk, no reason at all to believe this really.

I really think humour actually works to reinforce existing prejudices - it's generally done before thought, based on your pre-existing ideas.

"Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent." The problem is always to invent new ways of labour-saving, because that's capitalism. We have always needed to adjust to changes, it's a constant. There's been several serious changes in the past 1000 years (emergence of capitalism for a start). This is not new and not accurate.

He claims that television will not work as a background. Heh. His idea that television means the viewer participates whereas other mass media is just a "packaging device" makes no sense and is never explained.

I disagree with most of what he says and he never argues it or anything, it's just there. It feels super wanky, like adbusters or something. There's even a John Cage quote about how the I-Ching helped him find "joy". There are a few ok bits but it's not worth going through the rot.

"Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonial rebellions" is stretching the truth a lot.

Talk about "Orientalizing" the West is gross and racist and makes no sense.

The idea that electronic media brings us into a village again has not really been borne out at all.

Will appeal if you love going on about "spectacle", "sheeple" or talking about how revolutionary twitter is. Will not appeal if you want decent politics, good arguments, good writing, good analysis, or good art. Admittedly I'm probably being unfair with a 1 star rating, but I'm sick of technological fetishism and there really wasn't anything convincing or exciting in this. ( )

Creative idea but not executed in a way that was especially conducive to my learning. I’d have preferred to read something more wordy as I thought the ideas were very interesting but not always accessible. ( )

Perhaps if I took a course in media studies, I would understand this book. I actually read it about age 13, I believe, and I can't say that fifty years later I understand it any better. ( )