Marshall McLuhan multimedia collection:

1 documentary video from 2002 called "McLuhan's Wake", 1 45-minute television

program/biography from 1999, an encoded-to-mp3 copy of Side A and B of Marshall
McLuhan's out of print LP record from 1968, 4 Real Video files of the 2004 McLuhan
International Festival of the Future, 2 lectures given by Terence McKenna
discussing and elaborating the ideas of McLuhan, 1 casual recording of McLuhan
with high-school students in the late 60s, 1 speech at an author's luncheon in
1966 and 2 interviews with Marshall McLuhan in 1970 and '71 as well as several
audio-clips/pics/transcripts of his appearances on various Canadian Broadcasting
Company programs from 1960-1981, 1 recent interview with his wife- Corinne
McLuhan, and 20 miscellaneous pdf files about the diverse research and
developments of this often misunderstood scholar's contributions to our world,
including an introduction to the 1994 edition of "Understanding Media".

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
- http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/
- http://www.mcluhan.ca/
- http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/mstudies.htm

McLuhan's Wake Collector's Edition DVD:

Primitive Entertainment, Inc. - http://www.primitive.net/
National Film Board of Canada - http://www.nfb.ca/

Duration: 1:33:51
Bit rate: 224kbps
Dimensions: 720x480 DivX with Subtitle files
Size: 996mb

* The Collector's Edition DVD includes the original feature-length documentary,

along with exclusive supplemental interviews and features for McLuhan scholars and
enthusiasts. NOTE: A great deal of these interviews and interactive features are
not included in this torrent, but you can purchase the DVD here:
http://www2.nfb.ca/boutique/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?a=b&formatid=51483&support=DVD

The opening sequence of McLuhan�s Wake foreshadows the aesthetic quality of the
rest of the film. It begins with a montage of video images � crashing seas, a
dancing ballerina, the Challenger shuttle � edited together with audio from
Marshall McLuhan and original New Age music. This rapid succession of
heterogeneous images fades into a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe�s The Descent into
the Maelstrom, complete with animation, special effects and narration by Eric
McLuhan. As did so much of the literature that Marshall McLuhan read, The Descent
into the Maelstrom impacted his thinking. However, the 1840 Poe short story is
even more significant according to McLuhan�s Wake; the film suggests the mariner�s
struggle in the story provides a metaphor for McLuhan�s own attempt to make sense
of the swirling, whirling culture of media that could have swept him away so
easily had he not identified the laws regarding them.

McLuhan�s Wake is organized around McLuhan�s last scholarly book, Laws of Media,
which was published posthumously by his son. In this lesser-known publication of
McLuhan�s, he and his son argued that there are four laws of media: any medium
amplifies or intensifies some situation; any medium makes part of the environment
obsolete; any medium recreates or revives any older structure or environment; and
any medium, when pushed to its limit, can reverse to create the opposite of its
intended function. McLuhan�s Wake explores this tetrad of enhancement,
obsolescence, retrieval and reversal with examples from places so varied as an
elementary school classroom, the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and a Jaguar car
dealership.

The film assumes that viewers have at least a rudimentary understanding of

McLuhan�s theories. With its abundance of examples illustrating the laws of media,
McLuhan�s Wake makes the meaning of the tetrad extremely clear. The film also
highlights McLuhan�s better known theories on the effects of technology, including
its numbing effect, its potential for creating a global village, its
retribalization of man, and its incompatibility with a passive model of education.
Excerpts of McLuhan�s lectures and interviews illustrate these theories, edited
together with interviews from scholars like Neil Postman and Lewis Lapham and
narration from performance artist Laurie Anderson. However, the viewer rarely sees
the people speaking, causing them to become disembodied. While McLuhan would
likely be quite comfortable with this haunting quality of the film, it has the
potential to overwhelm an audience of students unfamiliar with McLuhan�s work.

McLuhan�s Wake does acknowledge criticisms of McLuhan�s theories, but it provides

no specific explanation, and attributes them mostly to jealousy or lack of full
comprehension. The film, which also loosely follows McLuhan�s life
chronologically, portrays McLuhan as having died without ever fully being heard.
In this way, McLuhan was the real-life mariner who made sense of and escaped the
vortex, only to be dismissed by his peers. The film does highlight the resurgence
of McLuhan since the computer revolution, but does not acknowledge that much of
this resurgence, at least in popular culture, may be a result of people�s
misunderstanding of McLuhan. However, the film does make clear that McLuhan
himself believed that computers enabled authorities to exert more control over
society. It also highlights McLuhan�s strong objection to technological change on
the basis of the resultant unpleasant effects on the human body.

Ultimately, McLuhan�s Wake succeeds as a film. Although it is slow-moving at

times, it captures the ideas and aesthetic style of McLuhan. However, because of
the McLuhanesque qualities of the film, it falls short as an instructional video
to introduce students to McLuhan. However, for students who already have some
familiarity with McLuhan�s work, the film can provide insights into McLuhan�s
thinking. Additionally, the web-based tools accompanying the video include
�Understanding McLuhan,� a brief but useful biography of McLuhan, and an
educator�s resource guide filled with discussion-provoking questions and possible
assignments. McLuhan�s Wake fills a long-time void for a film about Marshall
McLuhan, whose relevance to our contemporary culture cannot be denied. Viewers
should just be prepared to experience the film as they might any of his writings,
as a psychedelic intellectual journey.

The Medium is the Massage; with Marshall McLuhan.

Long-Playing Record 1968.
Produced by John Simon.
Conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel.
Written by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel.
Columbia CS 9501, CL2701.

Encoded to 192kbps mp3 and posted at: http://www.ubu.com/

The Medium is the Massage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is a book co-created by media

analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by
Jerome Agel. It was published by Bantam books in 1967 and became a bestseller and
a cult classic.

The book itself is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage
style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are
printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror (see mirror writing). Some
are intentionally left blank. Most contain photographs and images both modern and
historic, juxtaposed in startling ways.

The book was intended to make McLuhan's philosophy of media, considered by some
incomprehensible and esoteric, more accessible to a wider readership through the
use of visual metaphor and sparse text. In its artistic approach it is considered
cutting edge, even by today's standards.

The book's title is actually a mistake according to McLuhans' son, Eric. The
actual title was "The Medium is the Message" but it came back from the printer
with the first "e" in message misprinted as an "a". McLuhan is said to have
thought the mistake to be supportive of the point he was trying to make in the
book and decided to leave it be. Later readings have interpreted the word in the
title as a pun meaning alternately �massage�, �message�, and �mass age�. Its
message, broadly speaking, is that historical changes in communications and craft
media change human consciousness, and that modern electronics are bringing
humanity full circle to an industrial analogue of tribal mentality, what he termed
"the global village". By erasing borders and dissolving information boundaries,
electronic telecommunications are fated to render traditional social structures
like the Nation state and the University irrelevant. Prejudice and oppression are
also doomed by the unstoppable pressure of instant, global communication.

While today it looks like a black and white copy of Wired magazine, and its prose
reads more or less like boilerplate for any of the heady techno-utopian
pronouncements of the 1990s, it should be noted that it presaged the development
of the original ARPANET by two years, and preceded the widespread civilian use of
the Internet by almost twenty. For this and other reasons McLuhan is often given
the moniker "prophet."

There is also an LP based on this book, put out by Columbia Records in the late
60s and produced by John Simon, but otherwise keeping the same credits as the
book. It is fairly strange.

Terence McKenna - 'Riding Range With Marshall McLuhan' and 'Shamans Among The
Machines':

"Though the glory of our humaness is our spontaneous creativity, we too- as

creatures of physics and chemistry and memory and hope, tend to fall into
repetitious patterns. And these repetitious patterns are the death of creativity.
They diminish our humaness- they diminish our indiviuality, make each of us
somehow like cogs in some larger system. And we associate this cog-like
membership in larger solus systems with the machines that we inherit from the age
of the internal combustion engine and the age of the jet engine... you know,
Marshall McLuhan said that we navigate our way into the future like someone
driving who uses the rear-view mirror to tell them where they're going. It's not
a very successful strategy for navigating into the future."

"Computers are minds that work in the realm of computation; and human minds are
minds that work in the realm of generalization, spatial co-ordination,
understanding of natural language, so forth and so on. Are these kinds of minds
so different from eachother, pilgrims, that there is no bridge to be crossed? I
would submit not- that infact the bridge between the human mind and the machine
mind is symbolic logic, mathematics."

"I'm a full going, full hard-charging McLuhanist. And I really believe that the
strengths and weaknesses of the world we've inherited, are strengths and
weaknesses put there by print- and by the spectrum of effects which McLuhan called
the "Gutenberg galaxy". The spectrum of effects spun off from print- and if
you're not used to thinking in McLuhanist terms, it may not seem immediately
obvious to you that phenomenon as different as the modern notion of the democratic
citizen, the modern notion of interchangeable parts on an assembly line, the
modern notion of comformity to canons of advertising- these are all spectrums of
effect created by the linearity and the uniformity of print. It actually, in the
late 15th century, reconstructed the medieval psyche into its proto-modern form.
And we have lived within that print-constellated cultural hallucination for about
500 years- until the advent of various forms of electronic media in the 20th
century."

"... print just a convulsive 500 year episode in the Western mind, that opened
that narrow window that permitted the rise of moderm science, modern mathematical
approaches to the analysis of nature- and then obliterated its own platform, its
own raison d'etre, by allowing the growth, the appearance of the electronic
technologies. And my... sort of supposition about all this... I'm not an
apocalypterian or a pessimist- I may be an apocalypterian, I'm not a pessimist. I
think that this is all very good. Obviously, continuing to run Western
civilization on the operating system inherited from print, produces various forms
of political and cultural schizophrenia, which allowed to run unchecked would
become fatal; would create cascades of chaos and political destabilization that
would become uncontrollable. Governments resist change, governments cling to
technologies and social formulae that are already tried and true. In that sense
then, all governments are incredibly anti-progressive forces."

"The shaman is like a designated traveller into higher-dimensional space. The

shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people, and
go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances, and has collective
permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing..."

... and more...

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