This book details how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we're happy or not. We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling. The Mechanical Bride is vintage McLuhan so aptly illustrated by dozens of examples from ads, comic strips, columnists, etc., that those who were stung by McLuhan were hard put for rebuttals. 'What remains paramount are McLuhan's global standpoint and zest for the new. He has given a needed twist to the great debate on what is happening to main in this age of technological speedup' New Yorker 'The use of large reproductions of advertisements illuminates the text and often powerfully reinforces it...McLuhan is, happily, an indignant man.' New York Times