THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FOREIGN IN MEDIA McLuhan’s Critics on Gutenberg Era and the Hope in New Media

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to face basic theses of avant-garde and anti-utopia withMarshal McLuhan’s opinion on connection of alienation and media. Consideration of two competenttheories of media in context of strategy of avant-garde and anti-utopia seems to be recommended,as for productive measuring of their capabilities and limits, as well as for considerationof the one of the central questions of our contemporaneity, which is related to the effects andinfl uences of new mass media, which are usually being recognized in the problem of foreignness,in regard to alienation. In the second part of this paper, the author examines McLuhan’s understandingof alienation as a consequence of disproportion between sense ratios, and related to that,his critique of typographic man. After establishing the limits of his optimistic expectations fromnew audio-visual media to give the key contribution to desalination and rebirth of the new typeof the integral man, the author emphasizes the actuality of McLuhan’s idea of control by studyingthe new perception models.