Review by James Carey from Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

hotel aeropuerto RiminiSince Marshall McLuhan's death in 1980, new developments attest to his continuing relevance and the need we have, even more insistently, to grasp and extend his work. The most obvious example is that communications technology has developed along lines he anticipated with great prescience but with even greater rapidity and variety than he could have foreseen. While satellite and cable television had dislodged the network era of broadcasting by 1980, the personal computer and the Internet, about which he wrote, but which no one could foresee in detail, were still garage shop enterprises. McLuhan grasped the consequences of the globalization of communications, the extension of the body as image and the world as simulation for the human imagination, consciousness, community, identity, politics, and violence before there was anything there to fasten on. Therefore, the problems of understanding media he analyzed are, if anything, even more insistently present. discount hotels in CannesNow, fortunately, we can "read" Marshall McLuhan in the original without straining him through the blinkered glasses of commentary and subsequent scholarship. The Video McLuhan is a six "volume" biography/autobiography taken from a career on and about television. Here is the McLuhan I especially remember: outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, provocative and often, if not always, right. The first three "volumes" are framed with a masterful on-camera essay by Tom Wolfe which alone is worth the price of admission: nuanced, insightful, generous, critical, ironic and hilarious. Woven through the commentary are clips of three decades of McLuhan's appearances on TV: interviews, panels, debates, lectures, off-hand comments, muggings, pretendings, put-ons, and declamations. It is as an inadvertent epic, a public life on the stage of television, a nest of Chinese boxes, in which the persona emerges out of and disappears into the very medium that presents, sustains and engages him. The final three volumes allow us to engage with McLuhan in three different decades and at three moments in his intellectual development. The 1958 film at Ohio State is a panel with Gilbert Seldes, Edgar Dale and Keith Tyler in sustained argument with McLuhan. The panelists are his foils and sometimes uncomprehending straight men. Tapes five and six are formal lectures delivered at Florida State University and Toronto's York University. They enable us to hear books in progress, the thinking through of problems out loud and out front. Taken together The Video McLuhan is a priceless archive for students, teachers and scholars. They will find a more accessible, even unmediated encounter than is possible through his books or, even more, through writings that pirate and divert his work on media without fully rendering it. Scholars, in particular, will find suggestions for research and scholarship aplenty, enough to sustain many an intellectual lifetime. This production has restored Marshall McLuhan to a fully dimensioned intellectual life setting us once again on the rocky course of understanding media.

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