Until now, no book has explored the full expanse of Marshall McLuhan's thinking. Here we have assembled alongside his most prescient aphorisms excerpts from the full range of his astounding life's work. One revolutionary book distills the wisdom and wit of the man who explained to us the "the medium is the message" and that we are "now living in a global village", that "privacy invasion is now our most important knowledge industry" and that "obsolescence is the moment of superabundance".
Cover to cover, Anthology is not only one hundred percent McLuhan's own words, these are McLuhan's finest words. McLuhan called these bold perceptions probes and today they gleam like gems embedded everywhere in his life's output - in his books, in more than 200 speeches, in his classes (especially the Monday Night Seminars), and most of all in the nearly 700 shorter writings that he published between 1945 and 1980. In recent years, his son Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns have combed through all these sources to compile and edit what has become Anthology - The Book of Probes.
The collection is so fresh that most probes will be new to even the most avid readers of McLuhan, and opens a new portal to McLuhan's mind, one that promises to change the ways in which we recognize and interpret McLuhan in the future. Readers will marvel at how the consistency, the clarity of concept, and the abundant wealth of observations, some made twenty or thirty years apart, dovetail to form a whole.
Art Director and Designer David Carson presents McLuhan's images with new insight, and has built a work of art that is reminiscent of those lasting works permanently commissioned and interpreted by new generations.
One of the most controversial and original thinkers of our time, McLuhan is universally regarded as the father of communications and media studies. But he is far more than that. A charismatic figure, whose remarkable perception propelled him onto the international stage, McLuhan became the prophet of the new information age. In his own time he drew both accolades and criticism for his intuitive vision, his steady stream of thought-provoking metaphors, and fast-forward glimpses into a world where software would eclipse hardware and the power of mass media would eclipse the power of government. The information superhighway fulfilled his perceptive observation that the world would ultimately become a global village.
