Marshal McLuhan †Charlatan or Visionary? :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Marshal McLuhan Charlatan or Visionary? Marshal McLuhan has been describe as both a media prophet and a pop prof (Wilcox). Although his book The Medium is the Massage was rejected by some academics (Wilcox), it became a popular success outside the academic world. His ability to coin such phrases as the global village and his ideas on how media influences ending allowed McLuhan to become an persona of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Some scholars argue that McLuhans voice was even swallowed up in the popular cultural movement (Surette). The word macluhanisme has been adopted into the cut language as a synonym for the world of pop culture ( gentlemans gentleman-about-town). But was McLuhan truly a pi championering scholar? It surely depends on how one defines pioneering scholar. I believe that many of McLuhans ideas, even if they buzz off become their own clichs and atomic number 18 not wholly understood, are valuable contributions to our academic and cultural herita ge by the fact that they are still discussed today.McLuhans writings have opened up a forum for much discussion and academic study, and have laid the ground for an area of study on communication mediums. In an interview with Playboy magazine, McLuhan argues that man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware(p) of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension (Playboy). McLuhan states that his acidify has the purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and companionable consequences (Playboy).Many of McLuhans ideas concerning media can be classified as technologically deterministic. He argued that several technologies, alphabetic writing and movable type, were responsible for the detribilization of society. By detribilization he was referring to the creation of the individual who is responsible for his/her own ideas. He thusly argued that in recent times, a retribilization was occurring because of the introdu ction of electricity-based communications technologies such as radio and television. As Playboy writes, this is the electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance.As critic Tom Wolfe asked reckon McLuhan is what he sounds like the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov - what if he is repair?