Marshall McLuhan: Excerpts from Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man

The reading begins with a brief overview of McLuhan's "Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man." He discusses how after thousands of years of technological explosions Western society has imploded within the last hundred years because of electronic technology. He explains that whole human societies have extended their senses into various media and the consciousness of advertising and technology. He describes the surgeon's emotional detachment with the patient in order to perform an operation and offers the idea that Western society has become detached from its self due to the influx of media. He goes on to argue that today "the globe is no more than a village." Electronic technology has connected societies socially and politically and has made it easier for humans to relate with different groups across the world.

The reading continues with "The Medium is the Message" in which he believes the medium shapes human association and action. He argues that a person's personal and social consequence of any medium is an extension of themselves or of any new technology. He goes on to say that the restructuring of human work has led to the fragmentation of machine technology. He explains that content in any medium is always another medium. For example, "the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of speech..." He also discusses historical examples as it relates to the medium is the message. He mentions a quote by Napoleon regarding the media saying that, "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." McLuhan also discusses De Tocqueville analysis of the French Revolution as it relates to print media by saying the entire country was now homogenized and culturally saturated by the written word. The medium had uniformed the complexities of the ancient feudal and oral society. He mentions several other examples to assert his belief that any medium creates a message and all media are related to one another to build a global information society.

The reading concludes with McLuhan's chapter on "Media Hot and Cool." He explains that a medium is either hot or cool. Hot media require little participation with its audience while cool media requires high participation. Radio is a hot medium because the audience does not provide much participation where as the telephone is a cool medium because it requires participation from both parties in order for the communication to take place.

The main points of the reading are his discussion of all media are extension of human capacity, e.g. Writing is the extension of the ear, eye, and speech. TV is the extension of hearing, visualizing, communicating, etc. Another important point he makes is the particular medium itself creates its own effects independent of representational content, i.e. the meaning conveyed in what is broadcasts on the radio, what is televised on TV, or what is written in the newspaper. Finally, another important point he asserts is his idea that we live in a "global village", e.g. Michael Jackson is dead in LA on Saturday morning, and people in Japan immediately mourn his death. Electronic communication has now enabled people to transcend time and space.