Book Review: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

A Book By Marshall McLuhan

Advertising Management Assignment
10/10/2012 Submitted By: S-24, Gaurav Bhuttani, FMS MBA (PT)

Book Review
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan. A
pioneering study in media theory, it proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study. McLuhan suggests that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. Dismayed by the way people approached and used new media such as television, McLuhan famously argued that in the modern world we live mythically and integrally ... but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age. Marshall McLuhan wrote about the significance of technology as extension of the human body. According to him, any technological innovation is an extension of our innate capabilities as human beings, that is, a means by which we enhance the capability of our senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.

Salient Points
During the mechanical ages, we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system it in a global embrace abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society So goes the initial argument of the author, Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The book was initially published in 1964. Notwithstanding the entry of modern electronic gadgetry and the decreased use of a number of technologies discussed in the book such as the telegraph and the typewriter, the books main treatise on the close relationship of man with technology remains relevant.

The Medium is the Message

The book was divided into two parts. The first part introduced the concept of media. This is where the oft-quoted phrase the medium is the message originated. According to McLuhan, the medium, or that which we use to extend ourselves, is the one that creates new scale into our everyday activities. If we take man-made light such as the incandescent light or fluorescent light for example, we may think that these technologies do not deliver any message unless they are used to highlight an image or spell out a word. McLuhan however wrote that artificial light which is a medium is also, by itself, the message because this light allowed us to see in the dark or to look at places that we cannot see otherwise. When light illuminates a room or the inner recesses of the human ear during a clinical inspection, the existence of light becomes the message itself.

Hot and Cold Medium

In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, were "hot" - that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.

"Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture and photography. Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached." This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous term

The Technologies
The second part includes the following topics: the spoken word; the written word; roads and paper routes; number; clothing; housing; money; clocks; the print; comics; the printed word; wheel, bicycle and airplane; the photograph; press; motorcar; ads; games; telegraph; the typewriter; the telephone; the phonograph; movies; radio; television; weapons; and, automation. A number of technologies such as the telegraph, the typewriter and the phonograph have become obsolete and the rest have changed as a result of constant innovation. The gist of the different chapters was on the enhancement of the sense organs and the human capabilities that the technologies augmented. Among the interesting concepts that McLuhan presented are as follows: Clothing and housing reinforce the protective capability of the skin. Clothing serves as extension of the personal skin. Housing on the other hand, as well as cities represents the collective skin that protects communities. Money mimics the prehistoric mans penchant of swinging from tree to tree since the exchange of money meant that one hand lets go while the other hand grasps or takes hold. Wheels accelerate the feet and caused the mushrooming of urban centers. The photograph extends our reach into the world.

The book is not an easy read. The flow of ideas does not seem to progress in a cohesive manner and some of McLuhans statements were not very clear. It was like reading a nonfiction prose in poetry form so that in some cases, I had to skip the ambiguous sentences and paragraphs. What made the book interesting though were not the lengthy discourses on the identified technologies but the insights that McLuhan made on the relationship between man and his technologies. Knowing what a process or equipment or a structure is and how it came to be is the stuff that fill encyclopedia or manuals or textbooks and trade books. But understanding the why of their existence which was what McLuhan succeeded to present in his book was extraordinarily uncanny and revolutionary. The authors insights carry well until the present times. His precept on the role of technology to man should even be frequently cited and be taken as constant reminder of how we use technology. While we keep innovating, we should also consciously keep track of the reasons for the innovations that we make. It will be a terrible future for us if one day, we wake up and we find ourselves overtaken by our very creations. We should take effort to ensure that what we consider as extensions of man could never totally overshadow or even subdue man. Throughout Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan uses historical quotes and anecdotes to probe the ways in which new forms of media change the perceptions of societies, with specific focus on the effects of each medium as opposed to the content that is transmitted by each medium.

McLuhan's concept of "media"

McLuhan uses interchangeably the words medium, media and technology. For McLuhan a medium is "any extension of ourselves", or more broadly, "any new technology". In addition to forms such as newspapers, television and radio, McLuhan includes the light bulb, cars, speech and language in his definition of "media": all of these, as technologies, mediate our communication; their forms or structures affect how we perceive and understand the world around us. McLuhan says that the conventional pronouncements fail in studying media because they pay attention to and focus on the content, which blinds them to see its actual character, the psychic and social effects. Significantly, the electric light is usually not even regarded as a media because it has no content. Instead, McLuhan observes that any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes", introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action", resulting in "psychic, and social consequences" this is the real "meaning or message" brought by a medium, a social and psychic message, and it

depends solely on the medium itself, regardless of the 'content' emitted by it. This is basically the meaning of "the medium is the message". McLuhan, to show the flaws of the common belief that the message resides or depends on how the medium is used (the "content" output), uses the example of mechanization (machinery to assist the work of human operators), pointing out that regardless of the product (i.e. cornflakes or Cadillacs), the impact on workers and society is the same. In a further exemplification of the common unawareness of the real meaning of media, McLuhan says that people "describe the scratch but not the itch." As an example of so called "media experts" which follows this fundamentally flawed approach, McLuhan quotes a statement from "General" David Sarnoff (head of RCA), calling it the "voice of the current somnambulism". Each media "adds itself on to what we already are", realizing "amputations and extensions" to our senses and bodies, shaping them in a new technical form. As appealing as this remaking of ourselves may seem, it really puts us in a "narcissistic hypnosis" that prevents us from seeing the real nature of the media. McLuhan also says that a characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another (previous) medium. For an example in the new millennium, the Internet is a medium containing traces of various mediums which came before it -- the printing press, radio and the moving image. The impact of each medium is somewhat limited to the previous social condition, since it just adds itself to the existing, amplifying existing processes. Therefore different societies may be differently transformed by the same media. An overlooked, constantly repeated understanding McLuhan has is that moral judgment (for better or worse) of an individual using media is very difficult, because of the psychic effects media have on society and their users. Moreover, media and technology, for McLuhan, are not necessarily inherently "good" or "bad" but bring about great change in a society's way of life. Awareness of the changes are what McLuhan seemed to consider most important, so that, in his estimation, the only sure disaster would be a society not perceiving a technology's effects on their world, especially the chasms and tensions between generations. The only possible way to discern the real "principles and lines of force" of a media (or structure), is to stand aside from it and be detached from it. This is necessary to avoid the powerful ability of any medium to put the unwary into a "subliminal state of Narcissus trance," imposing "its own assumptions, bias, and values" on him. Instead, while in a detached position, one can predict and control the effects of the medium. This is so difficult because "the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody". One historical example of such detachment is Alexis de Tocqueville and the medium of typography. He was in such position because he was highly literate. Instead, an historical example of the embrace of technological assumptions happened with the Western world, which, heavily influenced by literacy, took its principles of "uniform and continuous and sequential" for the actual meaning of "rational."

McLuhan argues that media are languages, with their own structures and systems of grammar, and that they can be studied as such. He believed that media have effects in that they continually shape and re-shape the ways in which individuals, societies, and cultures perceive and understand the world. In his view, the purpose of media studies is to make visible what is invisible: the effects of media technologies themselves, rather than simply the messages they convey. Media studies therefore, ideally, seek to identify patterns within a medium and in its interactions with other media. Based on his studies in New Criticism, McLuhan argued that technologies are to words as the surrounding culture is to a poem: the former derive their meaning from the context formed by the latter. Like Harold Innis, McLuhan looked to the broader culture and society within which a medium conveys its messages to identify patterns of the medium's effects.

Critiques of Understanding Media

Some theorists have attacked McLuhans definition and treatment of the word medium for being too simplistic. Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhans medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework. In Media Manifestos, Rgis Debray also takes issue with McLuhans envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he too is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows: The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary public for mass consumption; the magical naivet of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious mana; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on.[ Furthermore, when Wired interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst . . . . McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology. Dwight McDonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his aphoristic style of prose, which he believes left Understanding Media filled with contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness. Additionally, Brian Winstons Misunderstanding Media, published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his technologically deterministic stances. Raymond Williams and James W. Carey further this point of contention, claiming:

The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism .If the medium whether print or television is the cause, of all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history is at once reduced to effects. David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhans effort to define the modern media ecosystem," whether it be due to what they see as McLuhans ignorance toward socio-historical context or the style of his argument. While some critics have taken issue with McLuhans writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as probes or mosaics offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space. McLuhan's theories about "The medium is the message", link culture and society. A recurrent topic is the contrast between oral cultures and print culture. Each new form of media, according to the analysis of McLuhan, shapes messages differently thereby requiring new filters to be engaged in the experience of viewing and listening to those messages. McLuhan argues that as "sequence yields to the simultaneous, one are in the world of the structure and of configuration". The main example is the passage from mechanization (processes fragmented into sequences, lineal connections) to electric speed (faster up to simultaneity, creative configuration, structure, total field). Howard Rheingold comments upon McLuhan's "the medium is the message" in relation to the convergence of technology, specifically the computer. In his book Tools for Rheingold explains the notion of the universal machine - the original conception of the computer. Eventually computers will no longer use information but knowledge to operate, in effect thinking. If in the future computers (the medium) are everywhere, then what becomes of McLuhan's message?