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Marshall McLuhan made many predictions in his seminal 1964 publication, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. Among them were his predictions that the Internet would become a «Global Village», making us more interconnected than television; the closing of the gap between consumers and producers; the elimination of space and time as barriers to communication; and the melting of national borders. He is also famously remembered for coining the expression «the medium is the message». These predictions form the genesis of this new volume by Robert Logan, a friend and colleague who worked with McLuhan. In Understanding New Media Logan expertly updates Understanding Media to analyze the «new media» McLuhan foreshadowed and yet was never able to analyze or experience. The book is designed to reach a new generation of readers as well as appealing to scholars and students who are familiar with Understanding Media. Visit the companion website, understandingnewmedia.org, for the latest updates on this book.
The author's thesis is that Western civilization's thought patterns emerged because of its phonetic alphabet.
The ability to communicate through language is such a fundamental part of human existence that we often take it for granted, rarely considering how sophisticated the process is by which we understand and make ourselves understood. In The Extended Mind, acclaimed author Robert K. Logan examines the origin, emergence, and co-evolution of language, the human mind, and culture. Building on his previous study, The Sixth Language (2000) and making use of emergence theory, Logan seeks to explain how language emerged to deal with the complexity of hominid existence brought about by tool-making, control of fire, social intelligence, coordinated hunting and gathering, and mimetic communication. The re...
This is a textbook for a survey course in physics taught without mathematics, that also takes into account the social impact and influences from the arts and society. It combines physics, literature, history and philosophy from the dawn of human life to the 21st century. It will also be of interest to the general reader.
This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan's thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan's thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan's arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.
McLuhan in Reverseproposes two new and startling theses about Marshall McLuhan's body of work. The first argues that despite McLuhan's claim that he did not work from a theory, his body of work in fact constitutes a theory that Robert K. Logan calls his General Theory of Media (GToM). The second thesis is that McLuhan's GToM is characterized by a number of reversals, including his reversals of figure and ground, cause and effect, percepts and concepts; and the medium and its content as described in his famous one-liner "the medium is the message." While McLuhan's famous Laws of Media are part of his GToM, Logan has identified nine other elements of the GToM. They are his use of probes; figur...
Originally written in the late 1970s, this book was untouched for more than 35 years. McLuhan passed away before it went to press, but Logan always intended to finish it. Looking at the future of the library from the perspective of McLuhan's original vision, Logan has carefully updated the text to address the impact of the Internet and other digital technologies on the library.
This second edition includes 37 new pages in a new Foreword and Afterword where Logan reports on a number of new developments in his research into the origin and evolution of language. The first edition of the Sixth Language was a recipient of the Susanne K. Langer Prize of the Media Ecology Association for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form.
What is information? A fitting question given the importance of information and the central role it plays in the economic and cultural life at the beginning of the 21st Century. It is said that we live in the Information Age, a claim that is hard to dispute given the ubiquity of the vast array of information technology (IT) at our disposal to generate, communicate, interpret and exploit information. We are surrounded by information thanks to computing and the digital "new media" such as the Internet, the Web, blogs, email, instant messaging, text messaging, cell phones, VOIP, Web cams, iPods, Blackberries, iPhones, virtual reality, virtual worlds, RFID or smart tags, nanotechnology and ubiqu...
Say the name Marshall McLuhan and you think of the great discover's explorations of the media. But throughout his life, McLuhan never stopped reflecting profoundly on the nature of God and worship, and on the traditions of the Church. Often other intellectuals and artists would ask him incredulously, Are you really a Catholic? He would answer, Yes, I am a Catholic, the worst kind -- a convert, leaving them more baffled than before. Here, like a golden thread lining his public utterances on the media, are McLuhan's brilliant probes into the nature of conversion, the church's understanding of media, the shape of tomorrow's church, religion and youth, and the God-making machines of the modern world. This fascinating collection, gathered from his many and scattered remarks, essays, and other writings, shows the deeply Christian side of a man widely considered the most important thinker of our time, a man whose insights into media and culture have revolutionized the field of media study and the way we see the world.