McLuhan and that book were the main sources in a seminar I took many 
years ago.  Dinosaurs had just barely died out.  At any rate, the 
professor leading this seminar thought that McLuhan was right on.  
Interestingly, the prof was a Shakespeare specialist, and made some 
parallels with the role of literature as a medium and the Bard himself 
that were off the wall but fascinating.

Tommy Walz


On Sep 22, 2006, at 7:21 PM, Steve Cavrak wrote:

> On Sep 22, 2006, at 6:15 PM, Vince Rossano wrote:
>
>> ... but we've probably gone far enough for this email list.
>
> I came to the same conculsion when I went off to buy some chicken 
> wings :). But if you or anyone else is interested, I've set up a wiki 
> for my notes on Postman ...
>
> http://www.uvm.edu/~sjc/pmwiki/
>
> Feel free to comment, but if you can, put your comments in ''italic'' 
> or somehow indicate who's writing.
>
>> As for McLuhan's book: your are correct that the title was "The Medium
>> Is the Massage", but the story goes that it was a printer's error; it
>> was really supposed to read "Message".
>
> That seems to be the wikipedia explanation too, but as someone who was 
> reading it and  Time Magazine's coverage of it, my roommates and I 
> were having fun with Time magazine (again) getting it wrong.  (Who 
> needs television when you have Time Magazine to get things confused.)
>
> From what I read and recall, McLuhan's understood both meanings and 
> knew that they were simultaneously correct. Like in Blink, our eyes 
> see what our mind has trained them to see, and that "media" both 
> presents and massages the message often to the point where it becomes 
> the message. (Which of course was the original intent of the person 
> issuing the communique.)
>
> Anyway, we can also put a "Reading.McLuhan" thread in the wiki.
>
> Steve
>
>
Tommy J. Walz
Technology Coordinator
Barre Supervisory Union