Culture Is Our Business - Softcover

Mcluhan, Marshall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345026950 ISBN 13: 9780345026958

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1970

Synopsis

Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.

About this title

About the Author

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a pioneer Canadian theorist and educator in the fields of communication and media studies. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1979 and became popular for his aphorism, "the medium is the message" which summarized his view of the media's potent influence on shaping culture and styles of thinking. His major writings include The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967).

Review

''Culture Is Our Business represents an essential component of McLuhan's body of work and provides an important contribution to media ecology, cultural studies, and media literacy. As with most of McLuhan's scholarship, its value and relevance has only increased since its initial publication.''
--Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, and author of Echoes and Reflections, On the Binding Biases of Time, and Amazing Ourselves to Death

''Here is an interactive playground à la McLuhan that takes you on a hilarious and revealing journey across Western, or better, 'American Civilization.' Reading this book is rediscovering the brave new world of (electric) advertising in its prime; most incisively, it suggests a tactic to escape the enchanting songs of corporate art to fully see the Emperor's new clothes.''
--Elena Lamberti, Professor of North American Studies, University of Bologna, and author of Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic --Wipf and Stock Publishers

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1970
• ISBN 10: 0345026950
• ISBN 13: 9780345026958
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1