The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Communication and Society (New York, N.Y.).) (Paperback)

by Marshall McLuhan (Author), Bruce R. Powers (Author) "All Western scientific models of communication are-like the Shan-non Weaver model-linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek..." (more)
Key Phrases: resonating interval, satellite surround, resonant interval, Bell Systems, Third World, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
This is not a revised or updated version of McLuhan's Understanding Media ( LJ 6/1/64) or even War and Peace in the Global Village (LJ 11/1/68). It was written, according to Powers, between 1974 and 1980 (McLuhan died in 1980) and "put together" between 1976 and 1984. McLuhan's thesis has always been that electronic technologies have been altering and reconstituting people in ways they don't understand and causing them to lose their private identities. This book probes the same theme from different angles, but with the same McLuhanesque all-over-the-place reasoning. Powers seems to have had a leavening effect on the master's breathless prose and extravagant presentation. The book should provoke people to think, if nothing else. For McLuhan collectors. See also Philip Marchand's Marshall McLuhan and George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald's retrospective, reviewed in this issue, p. 75.
- A.J. Anderson, G.S.L.I.S., Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"Highly readable and valuable....I would unreservedly recommend the Powers book as the best available introduction to and summary of McLuhan's thinking."--Journal of Communication

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 17, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195079108
• ISBN-13: 978-0195079104
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #614,971 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #55 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > Future of Computing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars FIGURING OUT THE GROUND, September 14, 1998

By A Customer

This book is for the McLuhan enthusiast who would like to figure out the ground on which McLuhan stands. It is chock full of McLuhan's ideas, but not presented in McLuhan's typical style. Published 9 years after McLuhan's death, it seems likely that co-author Bruce Powers assembled the material for publication.

If you are not already very familiar with McLuhan's thoughts and earlier writings, this book is not for you. If you are already very familiar with McLuhan's words, you won't find anything new, but you will find some of McLuhan's basic ideas amplified and extrapolated.

Essentially an essential book for the McLuhanite.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Laudable Extension of McLuhan: Cool, Seminal & Involving!, December 8, 2000

By	T. R. Rak - See all my reviews

Powers says that this book is not about "final answers." By God he's right! And he proceeds to effloresce a wondrous garden wrought of the print medium brimming over with fresh probes, "osmic space," brains "astonied," the secret lives of "sense ratios," and other electrific, outsized insights and invitations into the futurepresent. One could readily argue and effectively so that "The Global Village..." is indeed a worthy extension of the medium of Professor McLuhan himself, ringing true and resonating orchestrally with the spirit and vivacity of that bright, iridescent, warm and radiant bulb which, tragically, went out suddenly and left us in darkness on New Year's Eve, 1980.

Feed forward 9 years. Powers'/McLuhan's "tetrad" is a mesmerizingly rich metaphor lending clarity and intensity to McLuhan's seminal 1964 probicon, "Understanding Media--The Extensions of Man." This "new" 1989 book is a MUST-read, a reverent continuance of McLuhan's oeuvre, a virtual channeling of his spirit, and in various ways easier to grasp perhaps, more accessible even, than the monumentally revolutionary/visionary UMTEOM.

The beauty of McLuhan and by protraction Dr. Bruce Powers here is that these men are not pedants but facilitators. Their goal, much like that of Carl Rogers or George B. Leonard or Joseph Campbell, is not to pound stuff into brainpans, but to gently yet insistently open up minds to possibilities, perils, challenges, potentialities and joys imperative in the present reality/"reelity?" or whatever one wishes to term the agardish within which each of us swims, breathes, eats, creates, dances, defecates, procreates and seethes.

If McLuhan is the sorcerer, Bruce Powers is his worthy apprentice, now successor. In fact he veritably invites all of us to be successors (McLuhanatics?), to become involved (the essential definition of "cool"). This book is exciting, invigorating, pulsating, intensely involving and above all, highly rewarding. We need more extensions of McLuhan like this one. This is a superb nonbook, a hybrid medium, and a seamless read. TGV will get your probing juices flowing. It's as revitalizing as pure MDMA (as far as "the mdma is the message" goes). Buy this deceptively modest paperback, and step into it like a hot bath.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars a shameful posthumous misrepresentation of McL.'s thought., June 9, 2000

By	Howard Wetzel (Cleveland Hts., Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm surprised this travesty is still in print. "Not in McLuhan's style" is a kind understatement; Powers demonstrates flagrant misunderstanding and confusion of basic McLuhanesque ideas. Try 'Laws of Media' or 'Understanding Electric Language' instead.