McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was dubbed a media guru when he came to prominence in the 1960s. The Woodstock generation found him cool; their parents found him perplexing. By 1963 McLuhan was Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and would be a public intellectual on the international stage for more than a decade then linked forever to his two best known coinages: <i>the global village </i>and <i>the medium is the message.</i> <br/>Taken as a whole McLuhan's writings reveal a profound coherence and illuminate his unifying vision for the study of language literature and culture grounded in the broad understanding of any medium or technology as an extension of the human body. <i>McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed </i>is a close reading of all of his work with a focus on tracing the systematic development of his thought. The overriding objective is to clarify all of McLuhan's thinking to consolidate it in a fashion which prevents misreading and to open the way to advancing his own program: ensuring that the world does not sleepwalk into the twenty-first century with nineteenth-century perceptions.