The Mechanical Bride - Folklore of Industrial Man (50th Anniv. Ed.) - Marshall McLuhan

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

1951

*OURS is the first age in wruch many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike. Since so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness, and since these programs of commercial education are so much more expensive and influential than the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges, it seemed fitting to devise a method for reversing the process. Why not use the new commercial education as a means to enlightening its intended prey? Why not assist the public to observe consciously the drama wruch is intended to operate upon it unconsciously

Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
by Philip B. Meggs

Front Page

What's the score here? Why is a page of news a problem In orchestration?
How does the jazzy, ragtime discontinuity of press items link up with other modern art forms?

To achieve coverage from China to Peru, and also simultaneity of focus, can you imagine anything more effective than this front page cubism?

You never thought of a page of news as a symbolist landscape?

*THESE are only a very few of the questions raised even by the quiet front page of The New York Times. Many further questions are raised by the more sensational newspapers. But any paper today is a collective work of art, a daily "book" of industrial man, an Arabian Night's entertainment in which a thousand and one astonishing tales are being told by an anonymous narrator to an equally anonymous audience.

Nose for News

*Why does the Hearst press attempt to organize the news of each day into a Victorian melodrama? Anything queer in a big urban press going flat out for the small town. the small guy. and cracker-barrel sentiments? Is it a smoke screen or just the fog from a confoosed brain?

A nose for news- and a stomach for whiskey

*Kid, what the hell are you doing around here? Get out of it. It's a lousy busi- ness ... "

*But the youngster never took his advice. Year after year thousands of new youngsters decided there was only one thing in the world they wanted to be-a newspaperman. And the American press grew up

The old-time reporter has passed from the scene

The Ballet Luce Why do newsmen pose as the last romantics? Or is it the first romantics?
Why is it their plangent duty to achieve cirrhosis of the liver?
Is the newspaper world a cheap suburb of the artists'
bohemia?
Why the air of cynical omniscience and detachment cloaking the frenzy of the crusader?
Where did you see that bug-eyed romantic of action before?
Was it in a Hemingway novel?

The Revolution Is Intact

Just take a peek at our suburban dream through this convenient horse collar

You didn't know what a hero's last words should be? Let the movie magazines tell you

Deep Consolation

Charlie McCarthy

The Sage of Waldorf Towers

Freedom '10 I.ISTEN - Freedom 'IoI.OOK

Freedom to Listen

Book of the Hour

Roast Duck with Jefferson

Crime Does Not Pay

Know-How

Executive Abi lity

Heading for Failure