THE MECHANICAL BRIDE: FOLKLORE OF INDUSTRIAL MAN (1951) by Marshall McLuhan.
Marshall McLuhan was called "the prophet of the digital age." He predicted the social and psychological effects of electronic media before anyone else, and coined the phrase "the global village" to describe the new interconnected world we live in today.
But before that, he was a Canadian professor of literature who began to study mass media - before "media theory" existed as a serious subject matter.
McLuhan's lectures on the subject formed the basis of THE MECHANICAL BRIDE. This book picks examples of media from the 1940s and 50s - newspaper front pages, magazines, comic books, gossip columns, advertising (old ads look very silly today), and picks them apart with an intellectual scalpel.
One of the ads that McLuhan picks apart in this book.
(Note how ridiculous old ads often seem when viewed with today's eyes - but when they were new, they might have been effective!)
McLuhan's lectures on the subject formed the basis of THE MECHANICAL BRIDE. This book picks examples of media from the 1940s and 50s - newspaper front pages, magazines, comic books, gossip columns, advertising (old ads look very silly today), and picks them apart with an intellectual scalpel.
Please note: McLuhan is not a moral crusader. His tone is detached, witty, only occasionally condemning the cynicism of advertising agencies and their manipulation of the public mind.
Most of all he probes, asks questions, provokes the reader to think consciously about media:
- Why are Clark Kent and Dagwood (in the comic strip BLONDIE) popular, despite the fact that they are both rather pathetic?
- Why are ads using symbols to push products?
- How does a right-wing newspaper (the Fox News of its time) combine different news stories to create a "narrative" that pushes its agenda?
We may be more media-savvy today than when this book was new, but it is still thought-provoking, and McLuhan has a bit of "angry young man" in him here that is absent in his later works.
It is possible that this book inspired the writers of MAD Magazine to poke fun at ads, because THE MECHANICAL BRIDE is both clever and funny. Recommended!
Also recommended are McLuhan's books UNDERSTANDING MEDIA and THE GUTENBERG GALAXY.
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