Search Results for: mud wrestling mcluhan

Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 3 – Youth and Education

In my previous pieces based on Playboy magazine’s extensive 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan, I looked first at McLuhan’s ideas on how revolutions in our communication technology – particularly the inventions of phonetic literacy, later printing, and most recently electronic media – have fundamentally changed how we perceive the world and thus organize our society. […]

Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 2 – Retribalization

So following up on my first piece on the subject, I continue my metaphorical mud wrestle with the outside the box ideas of the coiner of the term “Global Village”, Marshall McLuhan. I almost had the occasion to meet the man in Toronto in 1970, since he was a collaborator and friend of my mom’s […]

Mud Wrestling with Marshall McLuhan

Well… mud wrestling in a sort of metaphorical way. My latest attempt to embrace and wrestle to the ground his at times elliptical ideas, with the title of this piece my homage to an outside-the-box thinker and crafter of provocative aphorisms like “the medium is the message”, its corollary, “the medium is the massage”, and […]

Marshal McLuhan

One of my life’s “gurus” is media philosopher Marshall McLuhan who believed that we humans were profoundly impacted (mostly below the level of conscious awareness) by our communication technology. His mantra was “the media is the message” and he also came up with the term “global village”. (Click the highlighted title to read the entire […]

From Civilization to a Circle of Equals

What follows is an outline of a book I intend to write and get published (even if self-published) in the next few years, based on a lot of the reading, thinking and writing I have done to date. The bulk of the links you find in the overview are to pieces I have previously written […]

From Civilization to Circle of Equals

Kindling My Own Interest in History I was originally introduced to the concept of “patriarchy” by my mom’s dear friend and one of my “Feminist Aunts”, Mary Jane Shoultz, at one of the many cocktail parties my mom threw in the early 1970s when I was a teen. It was basically defined as an ancient […]

Unschooled by my Electronic Greek Chorus

I have already highlighted in several previous pieces the important if not critical role popular music – mostly heard on the radio or played on a stereo – has played in my life. It’s like I’ve lived my life to a soundtrack or with a Greek chorus accompanying and commenting on and informing my life’s […]

My Real Issue is Human Development

I write from the point of view of a parent, a “lefty parent” as I call myself, which is intended to have a double meaning of sorts. I grew up in the context and values of a liberal Midwestern university town (Ann Arbor MI), but also being left-handed, I tend to think outside the box […]

The Death of Literacy?

There’s been a thread on the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) listserv I participate in titled “The Death of Literacy”, started by one of the more active list participants, Todd, who is closing down his book store which he has unsuccessfully tried to transform into a learning center or perhaps a library for alternative schools […]