The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
Marshall McLuhan
 McLuhan is concerned by the size and the intentions of the North American culture industry. "Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind," McLuhan writes in his preface to the book. He believes everyone is kept in a "helpless state endgendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike." McLuhan hopes Bride can reverse this process. By using artefacts of popular culture as a means to enlighten the public, McLuhan hopes the public can consciously observe the effects of popular culture on them. McLuhan compares his method to the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe's short-story "A Descent into the Maelstrom." The sailor, McLuhan writes, saves himself by studying the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. Likewise, the book is not interested in attacking the strong currents of advertising, radio, and the press. The book argues anger and outrage are not the proper responses to the culture industry. "The time for anger...is in the early stages of a new process," McLuhan says, "the present stage is extremely advanced." Amusement is the proper strategy. This is why McLuhan uses punning questions that border on silly or absurd after each visual example. On the technique of amusement McLuhan quotes Poe's sailor, when he's locked into the whirlpool's walls looking at floating objects: :"I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below." [italics original] This amusement, McLuhan argues, born "of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation," saved the sailor's life. By adopting the position of Poe's sailor, readers of Bride can escape from the whirlpool of popular culture.