Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,   ISBN:9780262631594

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I have read this book at least ten times. I learn something new each time.

If you are trying to understand "what society has become" or "what society is becoming", you must read this book. McLuhan was quite the visionary. He predicted it all.

Do not be discouraged if you find it a difficult read. It IS challenging. My advice would be to skip ahead a few chapters if you find yourself bogged down. As you move forward, something will eventually click. There is so much in each paragraph. It's not easy. But don't give up.

It is best read in a completely white room under a completely white light with no furniture or other man-made objects. You'll understand why once you get there.

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This is a highly seminal work written in a proverbial and poetic style: proverbial in that the theses generally apply to most medium consumers (though certainly at different levels) and poetic in that McLuhan writes using metaphorical language and analogies to convey his meaning. McLuhan uses an ostensibly esoteric communication style compared with the modern ideal of the demand for precise, plain writing. This rhetorical style is certainly intentional to exploit the communicative power of metaphor, to make his message stand in sharp relief amidst all other competing voices, and to demand pondering. It is at this point where people respond to his work/medium in a religious manner: either they embrace it after realizing the import of his theses or they dogmatically denounce it with vitriolic criticism of his inability to communicate.

In this day and age of the computer and all the protean manifestations of the internet medium, portable media devices, television, and the accelerated speed at which all this information is able to be produced and streamed to the consumer, his work needs more attention and consideration from a nurture and ethical standpoint (e.g., compare the large-scale humanitarian efforts by major organizations to modernize third-world countries with computers and the internet with the simple putative assumption that such necessarily improves social and educational elements of society). Our internal cognitive processes are becoming ever more hard-wired to and contingent upon external medium (i.e., "extension of the nervous system") to the extent that the duration and extent of cognitive "numbing" and "amputation" that takes place is intensified. The computer medium is perhaps the most heightened manifestation of cognitive substitution in that it is not limited to a single communicative message but is able to assume varied and evolving cognitive roles. For example, computers can assume the roles of all traditional medium and more such as its high valence with living global beings in near real-time. As contemporary humanity becomes more interactive with electronic medium - computers especially - the medium will have a "totalitarian" effect on the consumers.

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Today the words of Understanding Media seem in many ways to be merely the utterances of facts which are readily available to our understanding when looking at the continuous flattening of the world around us. However, at the time of McLuhan's writing, the age of the isolated Western intellect was finally influencing itself back to a more tribal reality of unity by means of its own technological achievements. McLuhan's media analysis is perhaps something which should be approached with the realization that he was writing at this truly stupendous speed up of the technological age which slowly had crept from human literacy all the way to the general literacy of the Gutenberg press to the eventual changes which were concomitant with electricity. Because of his temporal placement, he perhaps places a great deal more of what seems to be a positive moral spin on the developments of media as the Western world moves from the isolated world of the individualistic form of the book to the more tribal, immediate world of electricity.

Nevertheless, his message is a salient reminder of the fact that we are still on the verge of something which is wholly new and yet wholly old in the understanding of humanity. It has often been our tendency in the West to work segmented specialists with tendencies toward dualities, dichotomies, and segmentation as opposed to the more holistic view which is more noticeable in the smaller-scale tribal world of our ancestry. However, as McLuhan astutely observes, it is of great importance that we pay attention to the media of our day, not just in the traditional sense, but in the broader sense of how we represent the extensions of our humanity in all forms, from the most simple of media, light, to those far more complex forms of transportation and those forms of communication more commonly referred to as media in contemporary colloquial settings.

His assertion that "the media is the message" can seem to overplay the importance of the means of humanity's self-extension in contrast to the content of that extension. However, his insight of various forms of media, with their tendencies toward individualization versus tribalization as well as propensities for or against participation, should give us all pause as we look at the new forms of media which are developing in our own day. Humanity is further extending itself by means of globalization which is quickly allow for a greater extend of tribalization and communicative unity in the world. In many ways, the issues of globalization and the increased individual participation which is concomitant with it must give the Western mind no little pause as we venture into a world which is in many ways foreign to our individualized character.

However, the hope is in a revitalization of all that is good in the West through McLuhan's concept of the hybridization of media which proffers the possibility of new forms unforeseen when seemingly disparate media combine. While McLuhan's work appears to be something of a panegyric for the sun-setting of individualism in the Western way of thought, his work is highly instructive in the forces which face us in a day when a great involution of humanity is quite possible if we have the moral rectitude to see it through to a good end.

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Instead of writing a lengthy appraisal of McLuhan's UNDERSTANDING MEDIA and try to summarize his importance as a thinker and philosopher, I think I'll just quote Tom Wolfe:

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov?"

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McLuhan was, is, and (I suspect) will be required reading for anyone interested in media, as a participant or observer. His prose is turgid, repetitive, and challenging. Some of his concepts change to fit the way he wants to use them to argue a given point. He was daring; he tried to stare into the future, and he got it wrong at least as often as he got it right. But, when he DID get it right, it is astonishing to think that he was writing over forty years ago as he absolutely nails a trend in media in 2007. So, for that reason, I think that the words visionary, prophet and seer - so frequently thrown around - actually do apply to McLuhan. Once you've read a bit of him, it's also fun to watch how often McLuhan's ideas are erroneously cited or used elsewhere, as in that great scene in Annie Hall where, as I remember it, Woody and Annie are standing in line waiting to buy movie tickets and someone is spouting off about McLuhan. Finally, Woody can't stand it any longer so he drags McLuhan in person back down the line to have him tell the spouter - paraphrasing here - "It's clear to me that you know nothing about my ideas."

McLuhan rewards, confounds, and infuriates the reader. He's worth the trouble.