Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium
Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the Wired generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age.
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Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor at Fordham University. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (winner of the Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999), The Consciousness Plague, The Pixel Eye, Borrowed Tides, The Plot to Save Socrates, Unburning Alexandria, Chronica, and It’s Real Life. His novelette “The Chronology Protection Case” was made into a short film and is on Amazon Prime Video. His alternate history short story about The Beatles, "It's Real Life," was made into a radio play, won The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was expanded into a novel It’s Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles published in 2024. His novelette, “Robinson Calculator,” was published in the Robots Through the Ages anthology in July 2023. He was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) 1998-2001. His nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge, Digital McLuhan, and New New Media, have been translated into 15 languages. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the History Channel, and NPR. His 1972 album, Twice Upon A Rhyme, was re-issued in Japan and Korea in 2008, and in the U. K. in 2010. His first new album since 1972, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, was released by Old Bear Records and Light in the Attic Records in 2020.
'Paul Levinson explains the relevance of McLuhan's work for an understanding of new media. This guide to the information millenium is a deliberate wake up call to those unaware of the profound power of the internet to reshape our lives and society.' - New Sabah Times
'An amazingly well-researched, well-written, and above all else, well-educated piece of work.' - Communication Booknotes Quarterly'An excellent exposition of McLuhan's key ideas and their relevance to understanding new media.' - New Statesman
'Digital McLuhan is as much Levinson as McLuhan at the end of the day ... this is an extremely useful and thought provoking book. It could not be further from the gold-rush atmosphere in which the Net is most often discussed, and it's all the better for that.' - Irish Times 'A non-systematic look at McLuhan's very non-systematic textual legacy. Levinson shows that despite the info-glut, the medium remains the message - even, and perhaps especially, when the medium has changed.' - Publisher's Weekly 'Levinson continues the illuminating investigation into the evolution of information technologies and their effects on society that he began in The Soft Edge by offering a clarifying interpretation of the works of the guru of media studies, Marshall McLuhan.' - Booklist 'Levinson brings together a rich mix of the most influential and well-known thinkers, inventors, scholars, and doers of Western intellectual tradition, and he does so in such a way that they build a coherent platform on which the discussion of McLuhan then rests.' - Communication Booknotes Quarterly, Winter 2000 'The book is thought provoking [and] comprehensive.' - Intermedia 'Paul Levinson explains the relevance of McLuhan's work for an understanding of new media. This guide to the information millenium is a deliberate wake up call to those unaware of the profound power of the internet to reshape our lives and society.' - New Sabah Times 'An amazingly well-researched, well-written, and above all else, well-educated piece of work.' - Communication Booknotes Quarterly 'Now nearly 20 years after his death, his ideas have come to vivid life in Levinson neatly explicates and makes productive use of McLuhan's theories.' - Booklist 'The often prophetic social and scientific insights of Marshall McLuhan are laid bare in this biography of the man who coined the phrase "the medium is the message."' - Forecast 'Levinson explains why people have become intrigued with McLuhan beyond the 1970s, and why his concepts on the threshold of the digital age hold importance for modern times ... Essential for any thorough study of McLuhan's ideas in today's changing world.' - Midwest Book Review
