Mechanical Brides

"Ablaze with humor" (New York Magazine), Lupton traces the practice of marketing towards women

This collection contains key critical essays and assessments of the writings of Canadian communications thinker Marshall McLuhan selected from the voluminous output of the past forty years. McLuhan's famous aphorisms and uncanny ability to sense megatrends are once again in circulation across and beyond the disciplines. Since his untimely death in 1980, McLuhan's ideas have been rediscovered and redeployed with urgency in the age of information and cybernation.Together the three volumes organise and present some forty years of indispensable critical works for readers and researchers of the McLuhan legacy. The set includes critical introductions to each section by the editor.Forthcoming titles in this series include Walter Benjamin (0-415-32533-1) December 2004, 3 vols, Theodor Adorno (0-415-30464-4) April 2005, 4 vols and Jean-Francois Lyotard (0-415-33819-0) 2005, 3 vols.

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption. Liverant’s fresh approach connects the emergence and diffusion of these ideas with changes in political processes and social policy. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.

The essays focus upon popular culture as it is informed by ancient and current mythic images, narratives, personalities, icons and archetypes. Topics include: the cult status of the serial sex killer; sexual murder as a contemporary form of religious sacrifice; pornography as an everyday narrative underlying not only sexism, but also racism, homophobia, and militarism; the relation of incest to nuclearism; pornography and the sacred; cyborg myth; and subtextual presence of ancient goddess figures in contemporary narratives, including that of Princess Diana.

Through a series of focused and interconnected case studies, Out of School explores the long history of information art associated with the Toronto School of Communication. It highlights the perspectives of artists inspired by the speculations of Marshall McLuhan and colleagues as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the Toronto School’s ideas about information. Using pre-Internet media such as telex and the telecopier, the artists explored in this book materialized visionary concepts of information without the aid of computers. Harbingers of contemporary digital culture, Bertram Brooker, N.E. Thing Co., Robert Smithson, Wyndham Lewis, General Idea, and other artists approached information as something embodied, sensorial, and social. Art historian Adam Lauder recontextualizes this qualitative philosophy of information in relation to quantitative discourses and methodologies, which these creative figures make visible – sometimes inadvertently or satirically – through artworks that operate at the interface between art and business. While exploring how utopian information ontologies struggled to account for markers of identity and difference, including Indigeneity, gender, and sexual diversity, this book also highlights instances when information art was able to carve out spaces of agency and resistance. Offering an essential reassessment of the legacies of the Toronto School of Communication, Out of School broadens the network of practitioners connected to the school to include visual artists active both within and beyond Canada. In doing so, it proposes that artists made significant contributions to theory in their own right.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Transforming McLuhan explores the radical, humanist line of descent in interpreting Canadian media and culture theorist Marshall McLuhan's work, rejecting the dominant view of McLuhan as a conservative, uncritical herald of technological determinism and capitalism. This McLuhan is the oppositional critic of modernity, resisting uncontrolled technological change, who seeks new media forms with a human face. Contributors from diverse international and academic perspectives include Douglas Kellner, Nick Stevenson, Gary Genosko, Richard Cavell, Lance Strate, Glenn Willmott, Patrick Brantlinger, Donna Flayhan, and Bob Hanke." ""Marshall McLuhan was the first to theorize and to develop a concept of media, indicating their importance to all areas of society and culture. Today media are far more pervasive than in the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote. Yet his work has still not received its due attention. Transforming McLuhan will begin to correct this oversight."---Mark Poster, University of California-Irvine; Author of What's the Matter with the Internet? and Information Please" ""Transforming McLuhan re-reads the McLuhan phenomenon in light of today's media-saturated, 24/7 news and smartphone world. Here we meet again with the visionary Tiresias in the Underworld whose dark sayings once lit the late afternoon of the twentieth century. These critical readings create a time-out to question him again and to open space-time interstices for alternate thoughts and alternate actions." ---Michael Heim, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles; Author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality and Virtual Realism" ""Transforming McLuhan offers a rich and textured reconsideration of Marshall McLuhan's ideas, demonstrating how McLuhan's work is a better match for current multi-dimensional and ambivalent understandings of media and culture than it was for the narrower conceptions that guided those who dismissed McLuhan in his own time. These provocative and well-written essays persuasively engage in what I have called morphing' McLuhan with other key theoretical frameworks. As a resuit, Transforming McLuhan illustrates that cultural theorists have much to learn from McLuhanism, but that McLuhan's perspective also has much room for enrichment t from critical media studies." ---Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire; Author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Media on Social Behavior"--BOOK JACKET.

In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian Ursula M. Franklin examines the impact of technology upon our lives and addresses the extraordinary changes since The Real World of Technology was first published. In four new chapters, Franklin tackles contentious issues, such as the dilution of privacy and intellectual property rights, the impact of the current technology on government and governance, the shift from consumer capitalism to investment capitalism, and the influence of the Internet upon the craft of writing.