He wrote: “Despite McLuhan’s trenchant insight that the medium is the message, the virtual pet may not be so much a point of entry intro cyberspace for girls as it is a promoter of traditional values.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar
Marshall McLuhan is the most widely read literary theorist and is best known for his claim "the medium is the message".
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Other scholars with work relevant to "medium theory" include Marshall McLuhan (1963, 1966, 1988) and Neil Postman (1985).
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Although McLuhan strongly believes that the introduction to any new media will change the way we live, Williams argue that the new technology in itself has no real significance to social value unless it has been adapted to existing social and economic conditions.
However in sociology it is possible to see the "sentimental tradition" as extending into the present-day - to see, for example, 'Parsons as one of the great social philosophers in the sentimental tradition of Adam Smith, Burke, McLuhan, and Goffman...concerned with the relation between the rational and sentimental bases of social order raised by the market reorientation of motivation'.
Elihu Katz, American-Israeli sociologist, and winner of the UNESCO-Canada McLuhan Prize
According to McLuhan associate Dean Motter, Eric McLuhan also collaborated with his father on some books as a ghostwriter.
As Coupland has written about the effects of technology in previous works like Microserfs and JPod, he discusses the relations between modern technology and McLuhan's ideas in the modern context, with subject matter like Wikipedia and YouTube.
An example of this given by McLuhan is Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Soprano, whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an Assimil language book.
Lev Manovich, the author of The Language of New Media, lauded these 100 page "mind bombs" in the tradition of McLuhan and Fiore¹s The Medium is the Massage as a new operating system for the book.
From Nicholas Carr, "As media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."