Decades later, the observations made in this title, written largely as a collection of essays, are still incredibly relevant.

For any artist in New Media, any Publisher, and any child of the digital age, it's definitely worth the read.

"It is nice to be enfolded in a collective dream as long as the comfort is greater than the pain. But we have nearly passed that critical point. Consciousness will come as a relief.”

I'm going to just assume this aged very poorly.

Amazing book. Written in 1951 when only 1 in 10 homes had TVs. This book really sets the ground work for a lot of the intellectual paths that came after it.

The Mechanical Bride may have been an important book at one point, but now it feels very old.

"No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspective, either artistic or national. Everything is present and in the foreground. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. And whether it is to be a benign flood, cleansing the Augean stables of speech and experience, as envisaged in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or a merely destructive element, may to some extent depend on the degree of exertion and direction which we elicit in ourselves."

Very interesting read on the culture of commerce and the disconnect that can happen between members of our modern society.

An absolutely fascinating view of our culture from a completely unique perspective. This is where McLuhan started his journey of exploration into how our tools, and means of storing and moving experience shape how we view the world; as well as how they extend our various faculties and appendages.

A slow-moving, gnomic version of Barthes’ Mythologies, The Mechanical Bride is an early attempt by McLuhan to reckon with postwar America’s totalizing consumer culture. Here, McLuhan pairs cultural artifacts – mostly ads, some comics – with mini-essays that sort-of analyze and sort-of philosophize whatever it is that’s under scrutiny. If there’s a single takeaway from this, it’s that advertisements, the spear-tip of consumerism, promise individualism while effecting homogeneity, promise freedom (often literally) while effecting enslavement to an ideology of perpetual consumption. However sympathetic I am to that idea, this is nevertheless, for want of a clear thesis, tough going. It is also – seventy years after publication – a victim of its own success, by which I mean that the revelatory, shocking truths of 1951 are, today, well-understood. McLuhan’s ideas are, in other words, wholly dissolved into the culture, making him both worth reading and a pain to read.

كيف تجسد الاعلانات في المجلات والجرائد احلام شعب وثقافته؟ من مستحضرات التجميل التي تحوي وعودا بالجمال والانوثة، الى اعلانات السجائر التي تعد وعودا بأن تصبح أكثر رجولة، الى مستحشرات التنظيف المنزلي التي تعدكم بأنك ستكوني ربة بيت ماهرة لتسعدي عائلتك. احببت فكرة الكتاب وتعليقات ماكلوهن الساخرة
ولا أملك الا ان "أرى صوته" عندما شاهدت بعض الاعلانات الساذجة كلما عدت للوطن :)

First book of the new year! Marshall McLuhan uses commentary on ads to show how the best trained minds of our age have made it their full time business to get inside the collective public mind in order to manipulate, exploit and control. This generates a lot of heat but no light and keeps us in a constant state of mental rutting. AMAZING BOOK.

Definitely does not stand the test of time. Couldn't spend more than 5 minutes with it.