McLuhan in Print
Marshall McLuhan is a dense dude. I’ve read a fair amount of his stuff and much of it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t mean to take anything away from him by saying that, I still think he is the smartest thinker on media that I’ve ever read and he basically laid out a blueprint for how to think about the internet, but he’s hard to read. So when I talk about him and his ideas I often end up recommended his book The Medium is the Massage, which is essentially a picture book that explains the core ideas of McLuhan in a fairly interactive way (spoiler alert: for one page you flip the book upside down …). Anyway, it’s worth reading if you’ve been wondering where to start with McLuhan (plus the new version has a sweet cover by Shepard Fairey). And, if you like that, his most famous book, Understanding Media, just came out on Kindle a few weeks ago.