Customer Reviews

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

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At 16 (1977) I discovered the original paperback Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and it changed my world and the way I perceive every aspect of modern culture and technology forever. Throughout college, graduate school and a life of writing I have consistently supported my arguments and theories with ideas and quotes found within these pages. Fortunately I have not been alone, as entire branches of scientific inquiry, schools of academic thought, business models and technological breakthroughs can credit his lucid, vivid and coherent frameworks for their existence.

As an educator I endeavor to impart McLuhan's insights so that students might begin to see how profoundly every new technology changes their world.

This beautiful hardcover now sits at my side and includes historic details of McLuhan, the manuscript and its reception as well as valuable critical insights of W. Terence Gordon, an expert uniquely qualified to organize this edition.

This is a beautiful edition. And the critical commentary by Terrence Gordon provides a helpful structure for getting your mind around McLuhan's ideas.

Although this may be McLuhan's great work, it is not best place to start. It is long and often incoherent. On page 39, McLuhan introduces a notoriously difficult metaphor that he uses through the book. It concerns hot and cool media. "Hot media are ... low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience." So, he explains, hieroglyphics and photographs are hot, but the phonetic alphabet and cartoons are cool. Radio and movies are hot, but the TV and the telephone are cool.

Does that make any sense? If not, the better place to start is his earlier work, The Gutenberg Galaxy. It is shorter, and the logic is much easier to follow. It lays out the basis of McLuhan's thinking about how changes in media reshape culture. If you are a systematic thinker like me, it is a far better book to get the basics of McLuhan's analytical method and ideas.

Even if you have the basics, UM is a dense, inspiring, and unsettling work. In each of the 33 chapters, McLuhan makes connections that change the way I think about culture. But just as often, he makes some nonsensical analogy or leap of logic and then fails to explain it.

In the end, it helps to stop trying to understand UM and let it inspire you to think.

In other words, it is very cool.

This is one of the rare works which seem to explain new realities in a way which no one else before has grasped. It is the kind of work that gives a ' whole new picture of what is happening'. And if for this alone this work would be of great value.
I am by no means a media expert and cannot really comment on many of the claims of the work .
Its virtues are in calling attention to the new media( mainly television) and understanding how it changed our perception of the world, and of ourselves.
The basic MacLuhan distinction between hot and cold media between those which give us a lot of information and those which require our own greater participation in creating the reality , seems to me sensible to a degree. But where MacLuhan lost me was in his celebration of the present reality, the new culture.
I for one have the old- fashioned sense of the superiority of the reading world to the television world- the superiority of the kind of minds it produces.
I too think MacLuhan was over- optimistic in seeing the ' global village' as a kind of positive development for mankind. The fact is our world today is tremendously complex politically, fragmented in not necessarily wonderful ways.
It is possible to argue that this work ' foresaw ' the Internet, but even if this were the case it seems to me that we still have to consider the overall question of the meaning, value and virtue of the Internet.
Mankind's situation I want to suggest is much much more complex than ' the media is the message' in the ' global village' suggests.
I do not again think I have even begun to do justice to the richness and variety of MacLuhan's insights.
I just here would like to register the view that I do not believe that he really has given us ' the key' to understanding our world. I would even go farther and say however rich the understanding he provides about the media, and their relation to each other- he too is far from the last word in this. The questions now raised by the Internet world I think are in many ways outside those he considered.
Like all important thinkers he too is limited by the Time which has come after, bringing developments and problems he could not be expected to foresee.

Events in Egypt and an on-line discussion of a book about digital media once again have led me to dig out this edition of McLuhan's extraordinary work.

I have yet to come across anyone whose understanding of the media is as deep and wide as McLuhan's. His understanding that electronic media most lends itself to control by the user, and hence the understanding that "the media is the message" is something that few in the communications industry can get their minds around. The metaphor of light being neutral and able to convey various types of content is as relevant in the digital age as it was when electronic media meant TV and radio.

If more newspaper executives had read this book, it would not have reversed the trend to electronic media, but it would have better prepared newspapers to understand how their print media was being swallowed and how to survive in the new age.

But this is not just a big picture book. Understanding even the basics of the nature of various media can have a profound effect on our daily lives. While coordinating care for our mother with brothers & sister on the West Coast, use of email resulted in things being written that we would never say face to face, and even the threat of lawsuits among siblings who normally get along quite well. The problem was control over the message. Email (hybrid print media) did not give the lawyer in the family enough input while reacting to email generated by someone else. Switching to conference calls on Skype (a pure digital media) solved the problem immediately.

I wonder though if McLuhan was still around, what part of the body does digital extend? My suspicion would be the mind.