The Video McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan lives! Every time we wade into the deeper global waters of the Web, push the play button, surf the networks, fly a fax, he's around, like some benevolent ghost in the media machine. But perhaps nowhere does Professor McLuhan come alive more than in the superb Video McLuhan. This hefty 6 tape set provides what is certainly the most comprehensive overview available of McLuhan's life work. Wrapped in Tom Wolfe's wry and informative narrative, the first three tapes present a brisk essay on McLuhan's childhood, his early academic career and his turn to the study of pop culture and media (Wolfe's discussion of McLuhan's intellectual debt to Teilhard de Chardin is a real revelation). It's easy to forget the extent to which McLuhan's meditations on technological evolution, cultural discontinuity, and change resonated in the popular and academic imagination of the 60's and 70's. It's also amusing, but by no means surprising, that the good professor was enthusiastically embraced as a pundit and star by the very media with which he shadow-boxed during a good part of his career. The first three tapes include bountiful and fascinating clips of McLuhan in a wide variety of broadcast contexts--from epistemological jousts with the hoary likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Norman Mailer, to hilarious encounters with thoroughly flummoxed talk show hosts from David Frost to Tom Snyder. The second three tapes comprise recordings of a 1958 Symposium at Ohio State, and lectures at Florida State University (1970) and York University (1979). Over the course of these presentations and performances, we see McLuhan's central techno-determinist riffs unfold--from media as message, to notions of hot and cold media, to the rise of the global electronic village. Listening to this discourse is something akin to hearing a brilliant and possessed jazzman improvising endless freeform choruses--we're subjected to lots of tin notes, thin notes, and teeth grinding noise, but there are also passages of astounding clarity and prescience in there, too. The Video McLuhan is a must for any academic library collection serving programs in journalism, mass communications, film & TV studies, or popular culture; larger public libraries would be well-served by including it, too. Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)