Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Marshall McLuhan – 1964

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”

 

Profoundly influential on both academe and popular culture in the 1960s and 70s, Understanding Media put forth Marshall McLuhan’s radical approach to media studies, which was so completely unique that he was immediately acknowledged around the world as the foremost (even sole) authority in a field that he had single-handedly identified.  McLuhan’s world came complete with its own lexicon, which didn’t invent new words as much as redefine existing ones, such as ‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ and even ‘media’ itself.  It is a surreal book; though filled with memorable pithy declarations like the famous “the medium is the message,” it is also labyrinthine in its structure and multitude of literary and historical references.  It is a poetic book, too, a fact that has made some critics argue that McLuhan is more substantial as an author than a philosopher.  I don’t agree, of course, and as evidence I submit the simple fact that he has left no successors.  Individuals may indeed specialize in media studies, but none of them have attained anything resembling the vast reach of McLuhan, who kept mass audiences rapt with his wit and erudition in a way that is completely foreign for intellectuals in today’s world.  Of course, McLuhan’s message was misunderstood in some ways.  He was often accused of ushering out the age of books as if this was something he approved of; in fact, he lamented that state of affairs even though he tried to remain dispassionate in an almost medical way when writing and speaking about the coming electronic age and its resultant “global village.”  Something else that is easily forgotten is that McLuhan’s use of the word ‘media’ was not limited to content media or journalistic media like print, television and the arts; he meant anything that literally ‘extended’ the reach – physically or mentally – of human beings beyond what they would be capable of naked, silent and alone.  These media could be vehicles, clothing, money, clocks, games and weapons.  These are things that we have absorbed unconsciously as part of our environment, and part of what makes McLuhan’s work so startling is his ability to make us dwell on these technological advances that have liberated us from uninterrupted toil for survival and given us the luxuries of time and comfort to practice art, science and philosophy.

 

“In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”