War as education/education as war

Abstract

“Bad news concerns few, but good news can upset a whole culture” (p. 152). The year after the publication of The Medium is the Massage (1967) that started the collaboration with the graphic designer Quentin Fiore, Marshall McLuhan published War and Peace in the Global Village, a brilliant and quite controversial typographical experiment dedicated to the relationship of media innovation, social effects and war strategies, “with special references to education, war, clothing, games, and a few of the other more promising aspects of the other books” (Theall 2005, p. 116). Through the clever combination of images, literary fragments from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the abundant quotation of philosophical and sociological essays, McLuhan investigates the semiotic development of war as it concerns the human craving for power and dominion.