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This book argues that radical transformations in media and technology have reinvigorated debate about McLuhan's famous dictum, 'the medium is the message'.
In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was promoted as the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Yet when he died in 1980, his explorations of media were perceived as irrelevant and naïve. In recent years, however, McLuhanism has been resurrected. Why?This book argues that radical transformations in media and technology have reinvigorated debate about McLuhan's famous dictum, 'the medium is the message'. Today, his views on 'the global village' and 'hot and cool media' have been drawn into discourses on the sensory, psychological and social impact of virtual reality and cyberspace. Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality examines McLuhan's thought in relation to the information revolution, assessing his 'probes' into aural and visual culture and their problematic relation to the global and corporate matrix of the Web and Internet. It also discusses his claims in relation to postmodern theory and considers how McLuhan's renaissance connects with the posthuman 'cyberbole' of disembodiment and virtual identity.
Marshall McLuhan was a satirist and prophetic poet who explored subjects from the occult and the esoteric to everyday popular culture and the emerging digital revolution. Written in an accessible, engaging manner, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan sheds new light on McLuhan's goals and the background to his influential writings.
Marshall McLuhan made many predictions in his seminal 1964 publication, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. Among them were his predictions that the Internet would become a «Global Village», making us more interconnected than television; the closing of the gap between consumers and producers; the elimination of space and time as barriers to communication; and the melting of national borders. He is also famously remembered for coining the expression «the medium is the message». These predictions form the genesis of this new volume by Robert Logan, a friend and colleague who worked with McLuhan. In Understanding New Media Logan expertly updates Understanding Media to analyze the «new media» McLuhan foreshadowed and yet was never able to analyze or experience. The book is designed to reach a new generation of readers as well as appealing to scholars and students who are familiar with Understanding Media. Visit the companion website, understandingnewmedia.org, for the latest updates on this book.
This collection contains key critical essays and assessments of the writings of Canadian communications thinker Marshall McLuhan selected from the voluminous output of the past forty years. McLuhan's famous aphorisms and uncanny ability to sense megatrends are once again in circulation across and beyond the disciplines. Since his untimely death in 1980, McLuhan's ideas have been rediscovered and redeployed with urgency in the age of information and cybernation.Together the three volumes organise and present some forty years of indispensable critical works for readers and researchers of the McLuhan legacy. The set includes critical introductions to each section by the editor.Forthcoming titles in this series include Walter Benjamin (0-415-32533-1) December 2004, 3 vols, Theodor Adorno (0-415-30464-4) April 2005, 4 vols and Jean-Francois Lyotard (0-415-33819-0) 2005, 3 vols.
Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.
This book is primarily a summary of research done over 10 years in multimedia and virtual reality, which fits within a wider interest of exploiting psychological theory to improve the process of designing interactive systems. The subject matter lies firmly within the field of HCI, with some cross-referencing to software engineering. Extending Sutcliffe's views on the design process to more complex interfaces that have evolved in recent years, this book: *introduces the background to multisensory user interfaces and surveys the design issues and previous HCI research in these areas; *explains the basic psychology for design of multisensory user interfaces, including the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems cognitive model; *describes elaborations of Norman's models of action for multimedia and VR, relates these models to the ICS cognitive model, and explains how the models can be applied to predict the design features necessary for successful interaction; *provides a design process from requirements, user and domain analysis, to design of representation in media or virtual worlds and facilities for user interaction therein; *covers usability evaluation for multisensory interfaces by extending existing well-known HCI approaches of heuristic evaluation and observational usability testing; and *presents two special application areas for multisensory interfaces: educational applications and virtual prototyping for design refinement.
Computers have dramatically altered life in the late twentieth century. Today we can draw on worldwide computer links, speeding up communications by radio, newspapers, and television. Ideas fly back and forth and circle the globe at the speed of electricity. And just around the corner lurks full-blown virtual reality, in which we will be able to immerse ourselves in a computer simulation not only of the actual physical world, but of any imagined world. As we begin to move in and out of a computer-generated world, Michael Heim asks, how will the way we perceive our world change? In The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Heim considers this and other philosophical issues of the Information Age. With an eye for the dark as well as the bright side of computer technology, he explores the logical and historical origins of our computer-generated world and speculates about the future direction of our computerized lives. He discusses such topics as the effect of word-processing on the English language (while word-processors have led to increased productivity, they have also led to physical hazards such as repetitive motion syndrome, which causes inflamed hand and arm tendons). Heim looks into the new kind of literacy promised by Hypertext (technology which allows the user to link audio and video elements, the disadvantages including disorientation and cognitive overload). And he also probes the notion of virtual reality, "cyberspace"--the computer-simulated environments that have captured the popular imagination and may ultimately change the way we define reality itself. Just as the definition of interface itself has evolved from the actual adapter plug used to connect electronic circuits into human entry into a self-contained cyberspace, so too will the notion of reality change with the current technological drive. Like the introduction of the automobile, the advent of virtual reality will change the whole context in which our knowledge and awareness of life are rooted. And along the way, Heim covers such intriguing topics as how computers have altered our thought habits, how we will be able to distinguish virtual from real reality, and the appearance of virtual reality in popular culture (as in Star Trek's holodeck, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Stephen King's Lawnmower Man). Vividly and entertainingly written, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality opens a window on a fascinating world that promises--or threatens--to become an integral part of everyday life in the 21st century. As Heim writes, not only do we face a breakthrough in the technology of computer interface, but we face the challenge of knowing ourselves and determining how the technology should develop and ultimately affect the society in which it grows.