Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Most academic books are about ten percent new. Inovative ones are about 20 percent new. McLuhan claimed his was about 40 percent new, which is what makes is such a rough read. It isn't his prose style, which is charming and felicitous. But when introducing a new discipline, there must needs be enough bridges left to the old ones (in this case sociology, history, rhetoric, etc.) that redundancy occurs. That explains why you'll see some repetition in this book, as well as what appears to be disorganiztion. This leads some reader/critics to assume that UNDERSTANDING MEDIA is simply sloppy and poorly edited but far from it: it's a powerful, almost radical way to restructure our view of American (and hence the world's) society.

For what it's worth, I was a communications major in college (UVA 1977) with several McLuhan papers to my credit. charess@ync.net


Modern Mystic?   April 9, 2003
rareoopdvds (San Diego, CA United States)
40 out of 43 found this review helpful

Marshall McLuhan is perhaps one of the most influential authors I have read along with Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Eliphas Levi. What McLuhan does like the authors stated is not explain in descriptive terms the media, but process oriented direction of experience. I will explain that momentarily.

This book, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" is by far McLuhan's greatest book. It is set up like any useful text with the first part being the theory, while the second part contains the practice. He explains in the theoretical part that media is the extension of man. That all things created by man have come from man's own experience. This is like a dream, in one sense, where one must determine at some point that they are creators of the dream, and therefore, all content of the dream must apply to the dreamer's existence, and no one elses. Likewise, all inventions and discoveries are aspects of human dimensions that have been created by man, and therefore must come from man's inner experiences. These inventions are ultimately what McLuhan calls extensions, as they extend our human capacity for that movement or experience. The foot can travel so fast, while the tire is the extension of the foot, and therefore can move at a much higher rate of speed than the foot.

It seems that the most confusing aspect of McLuhan's theories is the idea of content versus context. The assumption of media study is to psychologize advertisments or the like. This way of approach is far from his point. He says, "My own way of approaching the media is perceptual not conceptual." What he is saying is that he uses his senses to gain understanding of the media, not theoretical concepts. This is what I mean about process oriented experience, where McLuhan discusses the experience one has by, say watching television, the mode of thought one has, the patterns of thought and behavior created by television.

In other words, we become the media that we have been shaped by in our culture and time. The spoken word, the written word and the telegraph, McLuhan noted, has had the largest impact on our society. Not because of their usefulness, or whether they work or not, but because society has patterned themselves after the respective media. Are not we becoming a computerized society? Does this mean we have lots of computers that run things? Or are the people becoming computer like in their behavoir and thinking? The latter expresses more accurately McLuhan's ideas.

The second part runs over a select group of specific media and their implications on the human mind. The context in which they were placed in is by far the most important aspect as it predicts when a new media might arise. All media have their logical origins. If one determine the state of the world now, as it is, one can determine the way of the media. McLuhan discusses the written and printed word, automobile, telegraph, aeroplanes, bikes, routes, newspapers, automation, games, weapons, and many others that make for a highly evocative read.

Is McLuhan a modern mystic? It might be a heavy title for some. If one reads well enough into his work, they may get the sense he is not talking about media at all.

Understanding McLuhan's approach is about upsetting the whole sensory environment. The appeal McLuhan has had on the ages from 1964, when the book was published, is in his aphorism, "Media is the message." This little phrase scratched many heads. Most of McLuhan's writings are like this. It is not about explaining it, but involving the reader to think for himself. To evoke, as in, evocative. So the conclusions must be the readers choice, either by intuition, study, assumption, or first hand experience. One thing is for certain, if you take the time to read the book twice, it will be different than the first read.

I can say, "if you only read one book..." but those that read this book are usually of the literate group. But for me, this book has not been an informative text, but a work book, a guide, an insightful prayer book, a reference, a resource, a magical text. I cannot reccomend this book highly enough.


Feeling numb? Herein lies the power to feel again...   January 20, 1999
21 out of 22 found this review helpful

I found this book in a second-hand bookstore for under one dollar. Had never heard of it, had never heard of him but I am fascinated by the media, specifically advertising. I wore this book out and replaced it with the new edition from MIT Press. I love this book. I still can't understand it in places (this makes me study it even more to try and understand where he is coming from) but it definitely changed the way I view the media and my place within it. We are definitely beyond being influenced by the media; the media has become the ground from which we operate.

The book is challenging and it is scattered and chaotic but there is a cohesiveness to it. I suppose that style of writing was supposed to be symbolic of the way the world is (or is becoming). This book will help you to regain your ability to reintegrate yourself with the real world and stop living life as if you have "autoamputated" your true self only to watch it live on television.

While many of the analogies are "out there," most are poignant and relevent. One example is McLuhan's interpretation of the Narcissus myth from Greek mythology. Narcissus did not fall in love with his own reflection. Narcissus had no idea that the reflection he saw was himself; he thought that what he saw was something other than himself. He became transfixed by the image; it was not love, it was numbness. The television screen is our reflection; we are not separate from it -- it is merely what is inside of us extended to the outside for us to look at, thus the subtitle, The Extensions of Man. We have become Narcissus; the media is the reflection we see and, instead of falling in love with the reflection, we have become numb, forgetting (or not aware) that what we are seeing is really us. Tell me that is not relevant today.


Understanding McLuhan   July 25, 2001
William Gawthrop (APO, AE USA)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

McLuhan, who served as the Director for the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in the mid 1960s, wrote four major works focusing focus on media's impact on society. The Mechanical Bride assesses the impacts of advertising on societal behavior and structures. The Gutenberg Galaxy assesses the influence of movable type (and the proliferation of books) on the individual. Understanding Media assesses the influence of a wide variety of media on man, his senses and his culture, and gives insight to the direction that it is taking. The Medium is the Massage explores the view that regardless of the content, the media conveying a message impacts society more heavily than the message being conveyed. Understanding Media, then, is not a solitary work. Written in 1964, it encapsulates the evolving thoughts of a futurist who is acutely aware that a variety of technological forces shape society and culture. McLuhan is not easy to read. He frequently buries his points by using analogies and historical examples that, on the surface, seem oblique to the issue under discussion. However, in McLuhan's mind, the analogies and examples are precisely on point. There is a key to comprehending McLuhan. McLuhan is a futurist. Organizations characterized by strategic vision tend to have five divisions of responsibility: The rank and file who perform daily tasks without regard to which direction the organization is going; The staff and management who organize, direct and influence the work of the rank and file; The executive leadership that provides strategic direction to the organization and who is directly responsible for the organization's success or failure; Translators who exist primarily to translate the vision of futurists into a language understandable by the executive leadership so that the leadership may decide in which direction to take the organization. The futurist, or visionary, lives in a world separate and distinct from the present - isolated from reality. The futurist's purpose is to envision, explore and blueprint unknown future, alternative, worlds so that the corporation may navigate safely without tactical or strategic failure. Futurists tend to see and articulate their vision in terms unintelligible to others save the translators. Once this is understood, the complexity of McLuhan's presentations become less distracting. Unfortunately, McLuhan did not filter his works through a translator and, therefore, comprehending McLuhan is similar to comprehending Spanish. Don't focus on the individual words. Listen to what he means. McLuhan develops three themes: First, technological innovation frequently has a disproportionate impact on society influencing individual lives, basic philosophies, and societal structures. McLuhan holds that television has changed our lives and mental processes by creating a thirst for all encompassing experiences; a thirst that seeks immediate gratification. As a window to the world, television invites participation and exploration. It creates wants and needs, provides enlightenment and encourages the viewer to actively participate in his environment. Second, that "the medium is the message." "The content of a medium is like the juicy bit of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watch dog of the mind." It is not the content of the message that ultimately affects us; it is the medium carrying the message. It is not the content of a book that is important but the movable type that printed the book. As a catalyst for change, movable type (and by extension, the printing press) shifted society from an oral culture to a print culture, fractured a church, and transformed populations into "the public". Third, that media can be categorized as "hot" or "cool". Hot media requires little audience participation because the medium performs the action in sufficient detail that the audience does not have to interact. Examples include print, radio, photography and movies which fully informs the viewer/listener who is in a receive mode. Cool media requires audience participation to fill in what is not explicitly provided by the medium. Telephones, speech and television require audience interaction and are, by McLuhan's definition, cool. McLuhan discusses a wide variety of media (paper, print, telegraph, radio, wheels, weapons, clocks, money and houses) showing that, in his mind, the content of one media is comprised of another media. The content of the telegraph is print. The content of print is writing. The content of writing is speech. McLuhan holds that developing technologies are used as extensions of man's physical and nervous systems for the purpose of enhancing man's need for increased speed or power. McLuhan distinguishes these developing technologies as either mechanical media (paper, print, movies, wheels, weapons, etc) or electric media (telegraph, radio, television and computer). Whenever mechanical media is developed and used to enhance man's senses, there is a measurable increase in knowledge or production. However, these advances frequently have unintended consequences for some other segment of society. For example, the advance of movable type (and therefore the printed word) resulted in an adverse impact on the oral traditions of preliterate cultures as well as fracturing the foundations of the Roman Church. McLuhan sees the telegraph, radio, television and the computer as a transition from mechanical media to electric media. The difference, however, is that rather than extending one or two senses, the electric media extends the whole man. Electric media provides instant knowledge and instant, broad based, communications effectively broadening man's awareness of the world about him and thereby shrinking the world to McLuhan's "global village". We are evolving from pre-literate, tribal food gatherers to an information based, electronically enhanced, oral society. For the first time in history, technology is not merely extending one of man's individual senses; it is extending our central nervous system. As electric media collapses time and space, and as electronic networks emulate human neural networks, we begin to see (through McLuhan's eye) man expanding his consciousness and his influence across the planet. At the time Understanding Media was being written, Paul Baran of the RAND corporation conceived packet-switching which became the basis for computer networking. The internet, certainly in its present form, was unknown to McLuhan, but it evolved consistent with McLuhan's views. Today's internet is composed of cool media: computers, telephone, and television (monitor with video card). The operating characteristics of the net requires extensive user participation and interaction. The synergism of the computer and the telephone produces a media consistent with McLuhan's thermometer and the net behaves as McLuhan predicted. If McLuhan appreciated the instantaneousness of electric media's contribution to knowledge, communications and worldly awareness in the 1960s, he would have been deeply gratified to see the internet ongoing evolution. Today's surfer interacts with his media far more than the couch potato, or the cell phone equipped teenager. From the bedroom computer desk, the surfer is likely researching social, academic, professional or recreational issues in the four corners of the globe without leaving his chair. Downloading images of locations he has never been, exchanging e-mail with people he has never met, and learning of things formerly the province of a few scholars, the average surfer is aptly described by McLuhan. "Men are suddenly nomadic gathers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, free from fragmentally specialism as never before - but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience."


The first systematic articulation of McLuhan's thoughts   July 1, 2005
Vinay Varma (India)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Marshall McLuhan's contributions to media theory are mostly dismissed in two phrases - the first one hardly his major contribution - namely: 'global village' and 'medium is the message'. And most people who manage to cite the second phrase as his contribution still miss out on his pun 'medium is the massage'.

In this book, Marshall McLuhan expands on the scattered ideas of his book 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' into a systematic theory of media. The book has two sections.

The first part details his theory of media. There are many fruitful ideas here worth a further study like:

1. Medium as at once the message (as it effects in spite of its content rather than because of it) and massage of senses.
2. Media as extensions of man (that is, any tool that mediates human action or thought rather than just communication media).
2. Hot media (which accentuate senses) and Cold media (which are synaesthetic).
3. Hybrid energy released by combination of media.

The second part details his interepretations of each medium in terms of his theory, and in accordance with his definition of media, covers things like cars, clothes etc., apart from television, radio, advertising etc.

Both McLuhan's general theory of media and his theoretical articulations of a particular medium provoke and inspire a new way of thinking about media, even if the reader might not agree with all his theorizations.