Publication Date: April 28, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0415249910 | ISBN-13: 978-0415249911 | Edition: New edition
Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.
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In this interesting if narrow work, Levinson (The Soft Edge, LJ 2/1/98) explains why Marshall McLuhans theories about the media are more relevant in todays digital age than when they were first presented during the age of television. Levinson points out that the Internet will be the vehicle for a convergence of books, television, and other media such as the telephone, thus making it much more, much different from any prior media. He then applies McLuhans tetrad, the four laws of media, which shift from warning us to remove our past-tinted glasses when looking at the future to indicating what type of territory we might see when those glasses are removed. McLuhan led the way in understanding the relationship of humans to technology; as Levinson attempts to show, his principles have been validated by the Internetwhich to many readers may already be obvious. Recommended for specialized collections.Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Levinson continues the illuminating investigation into the evolution of information technologies and their effects on society that he began in The Soft Edge (1997) by offering a clarifying interpretation of the works of the guru of media studies, Marshall McLuhan. Many of McLuhan's intriguing concepts were difficult to grasp due, in part, to his tangled prose style, but primarily because they were far ahead of their time. Now, nearly 20 years after his death, his ideas have come to vivid life in relationship to the computer revolution. Levinson neatly explicates and makes productive use of McLuhan's theories. He shows how McLuhan's concept of the global village is fully manifest in the Internet, as is his concept of the "discarnate man," the beautiful vision of "light-through" --the hypnotic effect of light passing through glass, whether in stained glass windows, television, or computer screens--and his prediction of an inclusive super media. Always lucid and provocative, Levinson explores the psychological impact of digital technologies as well as their profound effects on work and play. Donna Seaman--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
My novel The Silk Code won the Locus Award for Best First Nove1 of 1999, and was published as an "author's cut" Kindle edition in 2012. My other science fiction and mystery novels include Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), The Plot To Save Socrates (2006; author's cut Kindle 2012; Entertainment Weekly called it "challenging fun"), and Unburning Alexandria (2013). My short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. Nine nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009, 2nd edition 2012) have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and eight other languages. I appear from time to time on MSNBC, Fox News ("The O'Reilly Factor"), NPR, BBC Radio and other TV and radio programs - I like talking just as much as writing. I'm also a songwriter, and have been in several bands over the years - one had two records out on Atlantic Records in 1960s. My 1972 album Twice Upon a Rhyme (on HappySad Records) was re-issued on CD by Beatball/Big Pink Records in 2009, and on re-pressed vinyl by Whiplash/Sound of Salvation Records in 2010. I was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Top 10 Academic Twitterers" in 2009, and review the best of television on my Infinitte Regress.tv blog. Last but not least: I have a PhD in Media Theory from New York University and am Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.
Marshall McLuhan was a media theorist whose path-breaking insights about the impact of media are regarded as seminal.
Digital McLuhan is actually two intertwining books: one presents McLuhan's ideas about media and their impact upon our lives, the other presents the author's ideas about how McLuhan's ideas can help us make sense of our new digital age. It presents a lucid assessment and readable explication of McLuhan's method and 13 of his major insights and what they can tell us about the new world we are well on the way to creating. It highlights and explains the truly prophetic nature of McLuhan's theories on media. At the time they were first propounded, everyone thought McLuhan was talking about television, but what he was really talking about was the Internet-two decades before it appeared.
Paul Levinson explains the relevance of McLuhan's work for an understanding of new media. This guide to the information millennium is a deliberate wake-up call to those unaware of the profound power of the Internet to reshape our lives and society.
Paul Levinson is President and founder of Connected Education, offering postgraduates courses on the Internet for more than a decade. He is author of The Soft Edge, Mind at Large, Electronic Chronicles and Learning Cyberspace. He is visiting Professor of Communications at Fordham University in New York City. He obtained a PhD in Media Biology from New York University in 1979.
Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Formerly Business Development Manager with KPMG, Azlan is currently Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management Group, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo.
... He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the University of Westminster in London.Read more ›
Most people would agree that Marshall Mcluhan is the truly innovative, visionary character in media research. After Mcluhan, although there have been people trying to establish a different kind of theory or methodology regarding media research which is intended to be independent of Mcluhan's influence, their efforts seem to be fruitless. Most of their work becomes expansionary (and sometimes redundant) explanations of Mcluhan. We can discern from such a phenomenon that Mcluhan is indeed the master of modern media theory, and hence his work and ideas are requirements for those who are interested in this particular subject (as well as other sociological studies).
Therefore, I would recommend people to read Mcluhan's work in its originality first, try to develop their own way of critical thinking about media, and then apply the methodological approach to the study of the new medium, the Internet. I think Paul Levinson did the same thing in this book.
The writer did a lengthy analytical examination of the influence and potential of the new media whose development is instigated by recent enhancement of Internet related technologies. On the one hand, by adopting Mcluhan's media theory (tetrad, discarnate man, acoustic space, decentralization, global village¡K, etc.), the writer is able to come to the conclusion that the Internet will eventually become "the medium of media." On the other hand, the writer falls short of drawing evidence from other sides of the story such as technological, commercial, social, and governmental influences on future development of what he terms "the medium of media.
..." Therefore, although the writer's optimism concluding that most people will benefit from the forthcoming growth of the Internet industry is encouraging enough, one may judge it to be a little too simplistic and naive.Read more ›
I'm a multimedia artist and an educator, and McLuhan's metaphors have helped me grasp the media revolution that has been part of my life since the 50's My understanding of Marshall McLuhan's media concepts has improved by a quantum leap since reading Dr. Paul Levinson's digital mcluhan. This book has helped me understand how my early studies of media in the `60s, influenced by McLuhan, relate to my interest in digital media today. The writing is scholarly, yet concise and easy to understand. The author communicates joy in being able to tie everything together into our emerging Internet-centric multimedia universe. This is an academic book that should interest all educated media-savvy readers because of its clear, methodical explanation of McLuhan's insights. One of the best features of this tome is a clear, step by step discussion of McLuhan's metaphors: hot/cool media, the global village, acoustic/visual space, linear/mosaic, light-through/light-on, the "rear view mirror" of media perception, and the "tetrad" or four laws of media. "McLuhan asks four questions to clarify the nature & impact of a medium- 1. What does it enhance or amplify in the culture? 2. What does it obsolesce or push out of prominence? 3. What does it retrieve from the past, from the realm of the previously obsolesced? 4. What doees the medium reverse or flip into when it reaches the limits of its potential?" Now I will attempt to apply these media metaphors to my career as a multimedia artist. Professor George Drury, of the Humanistic Studies first introduced me to McLuhan in 1966 at Monteith College, Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Knowing my interest in multimedia, he suggested that I read Understanding Media while I was taking his Seminar on the Divine Comedy.... Dr Levison discusses the media revolution that the use of "electric" rock music created.I was doing "light shows"(lumia, the art of light and color) at rock concerts nights while attending class days. This is a harmonic echo of my `60s experiences. Using McLuhan's metaphors, I viewed lumia (the art of projected light and color) through the rear view mirror of art history: as an extension of the Gothic cathedral's 3D space, and stained glass windows. So, for me, the'60s "dance concert" then is an extension of the metaphor of acoustic space. Students then and now live in a "field" of knowledge, created by media. In the `60's my favorite media included lumia, electric rock, film animation, comics, and 35 mm photography . Members of today's "Generation Y " having grown up with computers, video games, and the web have a more intuitive grasp of digital media, especially 4 dimensional concepts and interactivity ("view then do then view, etc."). The WWW is developing as they grow up. This field of knowledge, unlike linear "book" knowledge is hyperlinked-a mosaic of information. As Mcluhan says, "there are no remote places, under instant circuitry, it's now, right there"(quote from a QuickTime digital video). Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage gave me some intellectual tools to understand the media of the emerging 60's Detroit Underground Rock Scene. Gutenberg Galaxy helped me with my two other chosen art forms typography(and its parent calligraphy) and photography. The metaphor of the light-through/light-on was especially helpful in understanding illuminated manuscripts, another medium I began to study at the beginning of my college education. As McLuhan became "trendy", I internalized his teachings. I had integrated many of his metaphors into my thinking, but none of my peers could fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and my professors either dismissed him outright or were uneasy with his popularity. After. receiving my M.A. in `72 and and working for two years as Curatorial Assistant for Precolumbian Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I packed my library and my art tools and moved to New York to pursue a career as a freelance multimedia artist. I designed and created multimedia for slide/film presentations for corporate communications and museums. These electro optical/mechanical devices were controlled by punched paper tape running through early minicomputers. I discovered that employers and fellow artists were "closet" McLuhanites. I was also involved in the revival of calligraphy when I joined the Society of Scribes late in 1974. There I met and studied with Donald Jackson, Alice, Paul Freeman and Arthur Baker. Shades of Gutenberg Galaxy! Now I could create illuminated manuscripts and digitally controlled projected corporate communications I had barely commenced using digital media when McLuhan passed on the last day of 1980. I knew that there were many more things about media that he could teach me. As Tom Wolfe said in McLuhan Hot and Cool : "Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov. What if he is right?" In 1985 I bought my first desktop publishing system consisting of a Mac computer with (512K of RAM) and Laserwriter printer. The software was MacWrite, MacPaint, PageMaker, VideoWorks, and Microsoft Chart. I had reinvented myself as a digital multimedia artist and continued using McLuhan metaphors to better comprehend the new media of desktop computing. When the `90s came around, it was with pleasure(and self congratulation) that I noticed his re-emergence in popular media as the patron saint of WIRED Magazine. It was there I first encountered Paul Levinson's writing, a March 1994 article ("Burning Down the House") that debunked the then "politically correct" notion that real world violence is a product of media (T.V.) influence rather than real world problems. "Telnet to the Future" (July `94) used Science Fiction metaphors to discuss info transfer through video and Internet media. In "Web of Weeds"(November 1995) Levinson quoted another McLuhan metaphor, that "the electronic world has margins everywhere and centers nowhere", which I thought apropos of my work in multimedia. In March of 1998 I attended the McLuhan Symposium at Fordham University organized by Lance Strate as I had begun teaching a class in multimedia production at Fordham. As I listened to the many excellent papers that were read, I was again reminded that the metaphors worked as well(or better) for me in `98 as they had in `68. I was happy to see Dr. Levinson there and listened closey to his presentation analyzing hot/cool media. digital mcluhan is a good book not only because of the author's deep understanding of a complex subject (he was lucky enough to have a personal relationship with McLuhan). but also because of how he links McLuhan's metaphors to today's digital media: Insightful, clear, and fun to absorb. I do have a few minor quibbles. Perhaps because Dr. Levinson was such an early adopter of the personal computer, he is dismissive of the impact of the Mac OS/gui. He makes a polarity of MSDOS ("business") and Macintosh ("fun", "playful fuzziness"). Sometimes he almost seems to be a Microsoft booster. Most of those involved visual media like the graphic arts, love the elegance and functionality of the Mac graphic user interface and never used the command line interface of DOS. Of course, Windows is improving with each incarnation, and I really like the left/right mouse buttons, sort of the left brain/right brain analogy of "point and click". digital mcluhan could have included more on how software opens up "tight" communications professions, with only a few practictioners, for example, typographers . During the first half of the 20th century there were probably no more than a hundred serious type designers in Europe and North America (I'm personally aware of a dozen on two). With the arrival of desktop publishing, the numbers began to increase exponentially into today's thousands of individuals who think of themselves as typographers. I think the same phenomenon is occuring today with desktop video creating a horde of new video editors. There is almost no discussion of the importance of comics in 20th century. They are the color publishing of hand drawn, hand lettered, hand lettered art combining a pictorial and written narrative. For instance are traditional "golden/silver age (40's-60's) Batman comics (a cool medium) "heated" in their "new" (`90's) (printed in "hifi"(extra colors, embossing, advanced illustrative/novelistic writing techniques on quality, glossy paper) incarnation? Did the new series of Batman movies, initiated by the brilliant work of director Tim Burton, with their advanced special effects and more "adult" content have anything to do with this? And how do using digital media alter our thinking? Photography is a high def, high info medium, usable as evidence ("pictures don't lie"), a hot medium. Photoshop is a cool medium, capable of high info (depending on image resolution) as it is mutable (antialiasing, image processing, effects filters). It also makes the various models of "light-through" and "light-on" color more visible, for example when we view the "channels" that are the basic components of the image. There are other reversals of digital media. Software usage migrates uRead more ›
