The Medium is the Massage

Jan 11, 2025 9:40 AM

Author:Marshall McLuhan

In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics

Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'Global Village' have proved decades ahead of their time.

How do we see the world around us? The 'Penguin on Design' series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar - a professor of English Literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Among his other works are The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

Quentin Fiore (b. 1920) is a graphic designer renowned for his collaborations with writers including the academic Marshall McLuhan and the futurist and engineer Buckminster Fuller.

If you enjoyed The Medium is the Massage, you might like Bruno Munari's Design as Art, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The media prophet of the 1960s'

The New York Times

'In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew'

Wired

Reviews

Blood and Guts is an excellent history of surgery... a highly readable book, full of gripping anedcotes

—— Irish Mail on Sunday

One can't read The Poincaré Conjecture without an overwhelming awe at the infinite depths and richness of a mathematical realm not made by us

—— Martin Gardner, author of The Annotated Alice

Reveals the human story behind the challenge of the conjecture, and gives us a glimpse of the weird world inhabited by mathematicians

—— BBC Focus

Beautifully written

—— American Scientist

Intriguing

—— The Times

A truly marvellous book

—— Martin Gardner

Clarity, compassion and commitment are presented in spades in this book

—— L Gen Romeo Dallaire, author of Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory.

—— Daily Telegraph Summer Reads

The practice of medicine is a way of living: vivid and engrossing, it stimulates senses physical and metaphysical...It is a rare skill for a doctor to be able to communicate this rich sensorium in writing. It is a delight to read the words of one who does it so well

—— The Economist

A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre

—— Christopher Hart , Sunday Times

This slender, elegantly written memoir by a female surgeon, Gabriel Weston, is a fascinating, no holds barred account of life in the operating theatre

—— Independent

Through this insightful book, Weston succeeds superbly in communicating the fascinating brutal reality of a surgeon's life

—— Ian Critchley , Daily Telegraph

Gabriel Weston's story succeeds better than any I have known...more riveting and thought-provoking than any fiction

—— The Lady, Susan Hill

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

—— Victoria Segal , The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

—— Elizabeth Day , Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

—— Rachel Cusk

This much appreciated book should be a must-read for everyone who likes to travel, and should be translated into the languages of the world's tourism champions. It should also be a must-read for politicians and decision makers in development agencies to finally understand that tourism has lost the 'virginity' of a harmless leisure sector to develop into a dangerous global driving force which needs to be regulated and restricted.

—— Contours magazine

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