Revisiting McLuhan

Abstract

Three critical frameworks can be developed retrospectively to contextualise the papers that follow. These frameworks are best defined as modes of knowledge production through which McLuhan's ideas were produced and which continue to have relevance. They are, first, the communication and media critique: second, the left cultural critique: and third, the modernist/postmodernist critique — a socio-techno-aesthetic. Understanding McLuhan the person was germane to the idea puzzles he produced because, as a media celebrity, he practised modes of behaviour inconsistent with the production of critical rationalist discourse expected from within the academy. Even with strong scepticism of McLuhan's determinist views, his work sustains interest in the social consequences of media technology and may therefore be read retrospectively as an important corrective to contemporary studies of new communications technologies.