McLuhan: Hot & Cool

by Gerald Emanuel Stearn

Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Philip]

The biggest loudmouths of the '60s bloviate about McLuhan while shedding almost no additional light on his ideas.

[Jim]

The pieces by McLuhan himself and associates such as John Culkin are rare and often brilliant. As an extra added bonus, there's a piece by Tom Wolfe, who understands McLuhan so well that he did the wraparounds for a series of videos featuring him.

The downside is all the anti-McLuhan drivel which is intrinsic to the book's concept. Those pieces, and books by other deniers such as Jonathan Miller, are amusingly antiquated now that so many of McLuhan's predictions -- everything from the internet itself to the return of icons -- have come to pass.

[Marlo]

maybe a retrospective analysis of his readings would have been better than a contemporaneous one but the fact that none of the reviewers who thoroughly describe both the virtues and insufferable qualities of mcluhan could anticipate the prophetic visions from the totally hare-brained made me do all of that which is maybe why this took me months to read. that his ideas were universally acknowledged go be new it seems therefore they have been singularly influential on post-structuralist analysis, though his cybernetics idealism seems more run of the mill and also represents the core of everything unbearable about him as a theorist

[John Ohno]

The reviews and transcripts featured shine a light on typically unexamined parts of McLuhan's thought, and even the negative reviews (which are at times vicious) are rarely the result of reviewers missing the point -- proof that the editor dug far and wide to find a few dozen people who understood Understanding Media in 1968.

[Jeff Keehr]

I read this in an attempt to better understand McLuhan's theories about media. I instinctively knew that he was on to something but I could not quite grasp how to categorize each type of media. Even today I recall that TV is cool and film is hot, but I am still not sure why. (Remember that content is not relevant.)

[Jessrawk]

An odd book to stroll through long after the fact. The kind of one you pick up at a cottage & never finish. Full of McLuhan, but more full of detractors, questioners, & McLuhanites. Worth a read, probably, but doing it cover-to-cover is a little trying at times.

[Wagmi32]

Some decent recaps of McLuhan's ideas, can be repetitive at times. Would have liked more essays like Sontag's, which alludes to McLuhan and his ideas, but builds off of them. He would have preferred these explorations rather than summaries of his work. The Q&A at the end is awesome.

[Lysergius]

A collection of essays about McLuhan, some sympathetic and some plain uncomprehending.