Carlos Scolari and Fernando Rapa's Media Evolution: A Review

Marshall McLuhan burst onto the scene and became the preeminent thinker about media and their effects upon us -- a position he still comfortably holds -- with the publication of his two masterful works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). These two were unconventional books -- Gutenberg Galaxy exploded the very notion of chapters and turned them into blog posts almost 40 years before there were blogs online -- but they were undeniably books.

Not so, or not quite, the pair of publications that followed.   These were a lot a closer to Mad Magazine than a book, or, if a book at all, more like a graphic novel than a proper or improper scholarly book.  They were also co-written -- which has nothing to do with their structure, but is worth noting -- with Quentin Fiore (The Medium is The Massage, 1967; War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968).  McLuhan followed these with more "conventional" Gutenberg Galaxy-type books, which also were co-written, leaving The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village as standalone high-water marks of how to conduct a scholarly probe ala Alfred E. Newman.

But those two serio-comic books are chocked full of insights, worthwhile to profound, about the media world back then and where it might be headed.  My own first book about McLuhan (Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, 1999), a scholarly investigation in a form that your great-grandmother's professor would be comfortable reading (if not necessarily agreeing with) has quotes from and references to the two McLuhan-Fiore books in just about every chapter.  And I cherish the worn, cracking paperbacks of these sibling books on my bookshelf, right next to the other harder, hardcover works by McLuhan, or McLuhan and co-authors.

So I was truly pleased to get a copy of Carlos Scolari and Fernando Rapa's Media Evolution (Scolari's words, Rapa's graphic designs), which will fit right up there on my bookshelves next to Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village.  Most of the words are in Spanish, which I can barely read, but the images are pretty much all you need to get what the book is talking about it, and they're images Quentin Fiore, and Marshall McLuhan, would surely have appreciated.   The references in the book are also in the McLuhanesque tradition -- deep and far reaching -- and range from close McLuhan associates such as Bob Logan to science fiction pathbreakers like Bruce Sterling.  Hey, Scolari even managed to get a photocopy of a relevant page from my 1979 doctoral dissertation (Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media) into his book.

So, pick up a copy of Media Evolution, and enjoy and learn, whatever language you most like to read.