about the bookabout
Marshall McLuhan was the visionary theorist best known for coining the phrase "the medium is the message." His work prefigures and underlies the themes of writers and artists as disparate and essential as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Neil Postman, Seth Godin, Barbara Kruger, and Douglas Rushkoff, among countless others.
Shortly before his death, together with his media scholar son Eric, McLuhan worked on a new literary/visual code–almost a cross between hieroglyphics and poetry–that he called "the tetrads". This was the ultimate theoretical framework for analyzing any new medium, a koan-like poetics that transcends traditional means of discourse. Some of the tetrads were published, but only a few. Now Eric McLuhan has recovered all the “lost” tetrads that he and his father developed, and accompanies them here with accessible explanations of how they function.
About The Author / Editor
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was an internationally-renowned media theorist and perhaps the first genuinely "modern" philosopher of communications. In the 1950s, he introduced the concept of the "global village", a vast global "technological mind" that today would be called the Internet. Using humor and scholarship, he spoke of the interconnectedness of visual and written media—and nowhere do his theories achieve a more finished level than in the tetrads, as important visually as they are syntactically.
