Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Author

Marshall McLuhan, Canadian literary scholar and media theorist, then at the University of Toronto. First edition McGraw Hill, New York, 1964. Reissued by MIT Press in 1994 with an introduction by Lewis H. Lapham, and by Gingko Press in 2003, ISBN 1-58423-073-8.

Description

McLuhan's premise is that every medium is an extension of some human faculty. The wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, clothing extends the skin, and electric circuitry extends the central nervous system. Once the extension exists, it reorganizes the ratio among the senses, and that reorganization is the medium's real effect, independent of anything transmitted through it.

This is the basis for the book's most quoted line, that the medium is the message. The content of a medium distracts attention from the medium itself, in the way that a burglar uses meat to occupy the watchdog. What actually changes a society is the scale, pace, and pattern the medium introduces into human affairs. Electric light is his cleanest case: it carries no content at all, and it still restructured the working day, the night city, and the possibility of surgery and night baseball.

Extension has a cost, and McLuhan calls it amputation. Every extension of a faculty numbs the faculty extended, a process he grounds in the Narcissus myth, reading the name through the Greek narkosis, numbness. Narcissus does not fall in love with himself. He fails to recognize the reflection as an extension of himself, and is anaesthetized by it. Writing extends the eye and dulls the ear. The car extends the foot and weakens it.

The book's second organizing idea is the hot and cool distinction. A hot medium delivers high-definition information to a single sense and asks little of the audience, as with print, radio, film, and photography. A cool medium supplies less and requires the audience to fill in the gaps, as with speech, the telephone, cartoons, and television as it existed in 1964. The consequence is that cool media generate high participation and hot media generate low participation, and that a society's shift between them changes political and social life. The distinction has drawn steady criticism for being applied inconsistently across the book's examples.

Part Two consists of short chapters, each on a single medium, running from roads and paper routes to money, clocks, housing, weapons, and automation. The chapters are written to be read in any order and use aphorism and juxtaposition rather than sequential argument, which McLuhan defended as a method appropriate to a subject that is itself non-linear.

The term global village appears here and in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). McLuhan's version is not a benign one. He expected electric interdependence to recreate the world in the image of a village, with the intensity of involvement, the surveillance, and the tribal friction that village life implies.

Relevance

The extension and amputation pair is a direct precursor to the cyborg concept as it developed later. McLuhan describes the human as already technologically extended, with the boundary of the organism running outside the body, roughly a decade after Clynes and Kline named the cyborg for space medicine and two decades before Haraway made the figure political. He also anticipated the shift from tools that extend a single limb to systems that extend the nervous system as a whole, which is the condition most later work in the field takes as its starting point.

Criticism

McLuhan's evidence is literary and anecdotal rather than empirical, and his etymologies are often unreliable. Critics including Dwight Macdonald and Raymond Williams objected that the framework is technologically determinist, treating media as autonomous causes and setting aside the economic and institutional interests that determine which media get built and how they are deployed. Williams argued in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) that the intentions behind a technology's development are part of its effect.

Related Reading

• The Medium is the Massage
• They Became What They Beheld
• The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality
• The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
• The Language of New Media
• Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Simulacra and Simulation
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
• The Cyborg Handbook