Presentation: Marshall McLuhan – The Galaxy Reconfigured

My presentation on Marshall McLuhan’s The Galaxy Reconfigured from his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy. As an introduction, here is a quote from a great interview with him from Playboy Magazine in 1969. The whole interview can be found here: www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm

PLAYBOY: You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

MCLUHAN: Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.

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