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

Marshal McLuhan Charlatan or Visionary? Marshal McLuhan has been depict as both a media prophet and a pop professor (Wilcox). Although his book The Medium is the Massage was rejected by some academics (Wilcox), it became a pop success outside the academic world. His ability to coin such phrases as the global village and his ideas on how media influences culture allowed McLuhan to become an icon of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. few scholars argue that McLuhans voice was even swallowed up in the popular cultural movement (Surette). The word macluhanisme has been adopted into the French language as a synonym for the world of pop culture (playboy). But was McLuhan truly a pioneering scholar? It surely depends on how one defines pioneering scholar. I believe that many another(prenominal) of McLuhans ideas, even if they have become their own clichs and are not wholly understood, are valuable contributions to our academic and cultural heritage by the fact that they are stil l discussed today.McLuhans writings have opened up a forum for much discussion and academic study, and have fixed the foundation 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 alive(predicate) of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension (Playboy). McLuhan states that his work has the purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences (Playboy). numerous 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 domain of the individual who is responsible for his/her own ideas. He then argued that in recent times, a retribilization was occurring because of the introduction of electricity-based comm unications 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 Suppose McLuhan is what he sounds like the most primary(prenominal) thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov - what if he is right?