TESTI/ 1 / Jean Baudrillard /
This long review to M. McLuhan’s book that maybe influenced more than any other the contemporary sociology, also starting a new aesthetical and philosophical reflection about media and new technologies, has been written by Jean Baudrillard in 1967. Here the French thinker goes ironically through McLuhan’s theory of the civilizing process, in particular his interpretation of the so-called ‘Civilization of Books’. Working on the distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, he demonstrates how McLuhan’s sociological thought, although able to explain the revolutionary role of the electrical environments (those which lead man beyond the Age of Literacy and into the global village) is insufficiently equipped for a historical and social (and therefore political) comprehension of modern cultural processes.