1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

1983

• Brantlinger, Patrick. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.

• Brennan, Paul. "Excuse me, but I never said so: An Interview with Jacques Derrida. On the Beach 1 (1983): 42

"P.B. : You've suggested we should stop thinking about various media - speech and writing - that we should stop thinking about them ethically and that the two media of language are beyond good and evil. This obviously puts you at variation with someone like Marshall McLuhan who talks about the medium in very ethical terms - "the microphone created Hitler" and so on.

J.D. : Mm... I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension - the overwhelming extension - of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too." (42)

• Curtis, J.M. "Toward a Pragmatic Revision of McLuhan." Etc. 40 ( Spring 1983): 80-9.

"We may say that in general McLuhan understood literacy as creating dichotomies. He seems to have taken as paradigmatic the transformation of the binary pair of two people engaged in dialogue into the dichotomy of book / reader. Likewise, we may interpret Nietzsche's discussion, in The Birth of Tragedy, of the splitting off of the Dionysian and the Apollonian as the creation of a dichotomy. Since McLuhan took his paradigm for the development of Western culture from Nietzsche (the Dionysian is cool, the Apollonian is hot), we may interpret his statements to the effect that literacy tends to create dichotomies, and that cool media tend to resolve those dichotomies into binary pairs." 84)

• Jowett, G.S.. "Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan [review]." The American Historical Review 88 (June 1983): 745-6.

"The book is divided into two sections[.]. It is the second section that provides the meatier portion for the reader wishing to incorporate media studies in an approach to history, for it lays out in a clear, concise manner the major theories that espouse the significance of communication as a historical force. Thus the author covers the work of such pioneers as Robert Park, Paul Lazarsfeld, and the Canadian media-philosopher duo of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, often with greater accessibility than is found in the original work. The last two on this list have often suffered from misinterpretation and overinterpretation; Czitrom, thankfully, avoids both pitfalls, and he is therefore able to make the complex theories of these Canadian scholars available to a wider range of reader." (745)

• Kuhn, Harold. "McLuhan's Global Village Is Now a Ghost Town." Christianity Today 27 (February 4 1983): 72+.

"[McLuhan] utilized as analytical tools themes typical of the 1960s, notably that of the 'generation gap,' together with the old favorite, alienation. He felt that the development of electronic media, especially the transistor radio and television, revealed a radical 'generation gap' between the centuries-long era of linear type, pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century, and a dawning age shaped and determined by radically different forms of communication.

"In McLuhan's view, the era of mechanized printing led to a pedestrian mode of thinking, writing, and doing. This, he felt, suppressed the more characteristic human elements of feeling and spontaneity. Consequently, reason and reflection crowded out the sensory imaginative." (72)

• Mays, John Bentley. "The Snakes in the Garden." Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada . Eds. Robert Bringhurst et al. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1983. 156-191.

"[McLuhan] was hardly an unfamiliar name. Already the Toronto communications theorist was heralding the imminent collapse of the old distinctions between high art and popular culture, and among the various media themselves; and he was foretelling the rise of a new culture of perverse, punning, genre-blurring media consciousness from those ruins." (159)

• Nemiroff, Diana. "Rethinking the Art Object." Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada . Eds. Robert Bringhurst et al. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1983. 193-225.

"In trying to extend the idea of art an d to think beyond the traditional distinctions of painting, drawing and sculpture, Baxter, like other artists, was led into the area of communications. Contemporary life is full of mobility and change; and many contemporary artists have been interested in the rapid exchange of ideas, rather than embalming ideas in fixed objects. Baxter admits a large debt to Marshall McLuhan, who admired the artist's ability to see things in a new light and predicted an important role for asrtists in helping the rest of society assimilate the technological changes introduced by new media. By 1969, the N.E. Thing Co. was developing conceptual works for transmission by telex and telecopier. The aim, as Baxter suggests in a later interview, was to explore the way in which information media alter our perceptions and relationship to the world around us: "By using media, you can penetrate anywhere, and be in touch, and that's what the world is all about right now." (1983)