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The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

marshall mcluhan philip b. meggs

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This is the devastating book which first established Marshall McLuhan's reputation as the foremost critic of modern mass communications.The Mechanical Bride is vintage McLuhan so aptly illustrated by dozens of examples from ads, comic strips, columnists, etc., that those who were stung by McLuhan were hard put for rebuttals. It shows how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we're happy or not.We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1951

This edition

Format
160 pages, Hardcover
Published
January 1, 2002 by Gingko Pr Inc
ISBN
9781584230502
ASIN
1584230509
Language
English

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About the author

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marshall mcluhan

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Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.

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Rating(3.7 / 5.0, 33 votes)
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33 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
wassi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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McLuhan prints a really old advertisement then gives his opinions on it on the same or opposite page. The ads are hideous, the opinions trite, and the book worthless.

McLuhan admits in the preface that he is not doing art criticism but rather politics dressed up as art criticism. So not only is he misusing art but he is doing what he accuses mass media of doing - trying to force his opinions on others under the disguise of them being what the others want.

No. No thank you, we are fine thanks and do not need your wares.
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aznhuynh1250
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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As I was reading this book one thought accompanied me throughout reading almost all of it: was this really published 1951? The author's ability to unravel the mysteries of the human psyche in our modern time was truly amazing!
Highly recommended!
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Smartreviews
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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In interesting contrast to McLuhan's later works which often seem more relevant now than in his own day, this, his first book, is firmly rooted in its time. The ideas McLuhan would become famous for are undeveloped or at least unexplored in this volume and instead what we have here is a collection of essays, reviews, articles, all over the place and all examining pieces of advertising and pop culture with a style emulating the same and blending in with the newspaper articles and commercials so that it is easy to get lost between McLuhan and newspaper articles and ads, all being relics of the past in their own way. It is a very interesting book, but for often the precisely opposite reasons than McLuhan's other works and it is surprisingly difficult to read for the very same reason it was probably easy to read and a hit in its own day.
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RobustKnight
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"The Vanguard Press (1926–1988) was a United States publishing house established with a $100,000 grant from the left wing American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund."
Self-explanatory. Don't pick up this book expecting anything less than the most painful 157 pages of wretched, petulant leftist claptrap you'd find outside of a community college. Honestly delivered more of a headache than Sorrel's Reflections on Violence, which I'd consider a major accomplishment.
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callmerussu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A frightening book about tv, radio, print and other ads, ones that change our goals, alter the neighborhood, and elect our presidents. It's impossible to measure precisely how ads affect our lives, but this book tries. Let's face it, from now until the day we die, morning, noon and night, seven days a week, we're going to be bombarded by mind numbing ads. Escaping the effects of ads is tough if not impossible. This book might make you think more about it. That's a good start.
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Kaiko
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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among the best of the mechanical ladies what got married books I ever did read.
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Prince-Baka
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride is dated yet fascinating due to the media McLuhan preserves in this book's pages. Readers approaching this to understand modern media or industrialization that manifests in folklore will likely be disappointed, but readers who approach this book from a historical perspective may find McLuhan's scattered thoughts an insightful glimpse into mid-century American suburban/cosmopolitan culture.
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kn4321
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I understand that McLuhan isn't much read anymore. My friends in their 30s hardly even know his name, and that's a shame because much of this book is still very much on topic today. I'd read UNDERSTANDING MEDIA a couple of times back in Com school and remember, with some aggravation, trying to sort through exactly what made a medium cold or hot. I also read THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, but without having read MECHANICAL BRIDE, I definitely missed a lot.

In this inaugural tome, McLuhan sets out his premises and goals -- mass media reflects the fundamental "folklore" of midcentury America and it is imperative on anyone who wants to understand the world to learn how to recognize not only the ostensible content of media but its deeper purposes and larger meanings. The book is a series of "exhibits" accompanied by insightful and playful analyses of the messages embodied in their form and content. Advertising is the main target but the author gets around to Superman, Humphrey Bogart, Crime Does Not Pay, and plenty of other pop culture artifacts. His focus, as the title suggests, is often on the replacement of sex with a kind of machine worship and the reduction of women to "parts" and inhuman objectification. I never realized what an influence McLuhan must have been on Pynchon's V!

Apart from the impact MM had on thought in the 50s and 60s, and his fingerprints on writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, much of what's here has passed so thoroughly into mainstream thought that it seems self-evident, and from that familiarity, I think, has grown a certain acceptance of manipulation, indifference to the message, and antipathy to the messenger.

It is hard for me to see how someone as brilliant as the author, as keen in his analyses, could ever have become a devout Catholic, since religious doctrine seems like the ultimate manipulation of opinion, but MM is also inherently conservative in many of his opinions, which may have lead to some of the backlash against his work in the 80s. The bottom line though is that the book is still thought-provoking and a lot of fun and I'm glad I happened onto a copy and picked it up.
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