Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan himself

McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (1974). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.”

McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with.

Which brings us to McLuhan’s ickier side. He writes a lot, like, a lot a lot, about how various peoples are unprepared to deal with the mediums that those in the West might be able to integrate more smoothly. He writes with large, sweeping assumptions, for example, about the continent of Africa and its peoples, and how such “primitive” societies might respond poorly to different media. It’s a bunch of hooey as far as I’m concerned, and it makes one question everything else he says about “understanding media.”

Where most other theorists have linked the movies to prior media like photography or theater, McLuhan links it instead with print, and specifically the book, given its visual presentation of a high density of information and its linear progression. I think there are fundamental flaws to this idea, especially when one starts to consider the content of the media (which, to say the least, is an area where McLuhan and I have some differences of opinion). He does, however, productively link it to an industrialized society where people come together to make one thing, which, he says, is similar to the symphony orchestra of the 19th century. He also, like Eisenstein, links film to stream-of-consciousness writing in the works of James Joyce and others.

McLuhan writes that TV is a medium well-suited to looser personalities (like JFK instead of Nixon, famously) and process instead of product. McLuhan also believes that, because TV (in 1964, at least) is a cool medium in which the audience must participate in order to experience closure, TV then leans towards the documentary and makes us into people who require a depth of knowledge on a subject presented to us via its poorly resolved images. I tried to foresee what McLuhan would have made of TV in is current form, which is higher definition and therefore hotter. I couldn’t really do it. McLuhan doesn’t provide a whole ton of great roadmaps for a project like that, and thinking of a medium without its content seems antithetical to me anyways (and, frankly, impractical, given McLuhan’s own ultimate failure to do so).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McLuhan is in conversation with scholars and writers of his time who, he claims, think about media in a wrong way. McLuhan’s arguments are indeed more expansive than many, though I think they are bound up in some really bad assumptions that taint them pretty thoroughly. More importantly, McLuhan has been a source for debates in several of the books I’ve read so far, and likely more as I keep reading. The strongest pushback to him I’ve found so far is Raymond Williams’ in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, where he argues that McLuhan’s is a theory of technological determinism which ignores the culture’s role in a given medium’s invention, production, and reception. There is still some merit to be found in McLuhan’s big ideas, but they need to be separated out from the unuseful stuff and properly accounted for to be of any real value

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

McLuhan’s strategy here seems to be largely scattershot. The first section of his book develops the big theoretical ideas before the second part, the longer part, dives into a bunch of media on an individual basis where he discusses that particular medium’s peculiarities in the context of his larger ideas. Within these chapters, however, thoughts seem to bubble up out of aphorisms and telling anecdotes. This can lead to a confusing and difficult to follow flow of ideas.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

McLuhan seems to be going for a kind of gestalt-based theory. He’ll throw dozens of vaguely connected ideas at you in a given chapter, from a variety of angles, and hope that something sticks. It often does, but it also leads to a sense of time wasted, unfortunately.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As a work of theory I think this is valuable but heavily flawed. I remain unconvinced of his content-less understanding of the media, while his imperialist tendencies make it difficult to read his arguments in good faith. I’m sure I’ll return to him, but more likely as a person to argue against than with.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

medium, message, closure, autoamputation, prosthesis, high definition, low definition, hot medium, cool medium, literacy,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (19)

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (20)

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as content. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (39)

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as an entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. […] For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology. (40)

Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world. (48)

The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. (76)

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (86)

If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy and the viewer or reader. (383)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. (392)

As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seem to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the chaplain ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. (395)

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. (419)

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. instead of the voting block, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. (427-8)

Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image and a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise: “What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation of a new medium like television?” People have long supposed that bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary closure of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (436)

If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education. Weather there ever will be TV in every classroom is a small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous cry now is, “Let’s talk French,” and “Let the bard be heard.” And oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for crash-programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge has become the normal popular demand since TV. […] the right approach is to ask, “What can TV do that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?” The answer is: “TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.” (439-40)

The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. (443)