Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial, slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.

This perpetual bloodshed is carried on for none of the usual reasons for waging war. No territory is won or lost; no goods or prisoners are seized … They fight because they enthusiastically enjoy it, because it is to them a vital function of the complete man, and because they feel they must satisfy the ghosts of slain companions.

Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions. They are collective and popular art forms with strict conventions. Ancient and non-literate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama.

The tribe or the city was a dim replica of that cosmos, as much as were the games, the dances, and the icons. How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the detribalization which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a mimetic echo of, and relief from, the old magic of total involvement. As the audience for the magic games and plays became more individualistic, the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became more verbal and less mimetic or dancelike. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy and group participation.

The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. Games are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. In games we devise means of non-specialized participation in the larger drama of our time.

A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time. For individualist Western man, much of his “adjustment” to society has the character of a personal surrender to the collective demands. Our games help both to teach us this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release from it. The uncertainty of the outcomes of our contests makes a rational excuse for the mechanical rigor of the rules and procedures of the game.

Games, therefore, can provide many varieties of satisfaction. Here we are looking at their role as media of communication in society as a whole. Thus, poker is a game that has often been cited as the expression of all the complex attitudes and unspoken values of a competitive society. It calls for shrewdness, aggression, trickery, and unflattering appraisals of character. It is said women cannot play poker well because it stimulates their curiosity, and curiosity is fatal in poker. Poker is intensely individualist, allowing no place for kindness or consideration, but only for the greatest good of the greatest number—the number one.

That games are extensions, not of our private but of our social selves, and that they are media of communication, should now be plain. If, finally, we ask, “Are games mass media?” the answer has to be “Yes.” Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.

It was in 1844 that Samuel Morse opened a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 obtained from Congress. Private enterprise, as usual, waited for bureaucracy to clarify the image and goals of the new operation. Once it proved profitable, the fury of private promotion and initiative became impressive, leading to some savage episodes. No new technology, not even the railroad, manifested a more rapid growth than the telegraph. By 1858 the first cable had been laid across the Atlantic, and by 1861 telegraph wires had reached across America.

Therefore, no new idea ever starts from within a big operation. It must assail the organization from outside, through some small but competing organization.

In England fury succeeded fury. A great storm of rage, humiliation, and despair had been gathering through the terrible winter of 1854–55. For the first time in history, through reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized “with what majesty the British soldier fights.” And these heroes were dead. The men who had stormed the heights of Alma, charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava … had perished of hunger and neglect. Even horses which had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade had starved to death. (Lonely Crusader, Cecil Woodham-Smith, McGraw-Hill)

By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old, compelled several major American newspapers to form a collective organization for newsgathering. This effort became the basis of the Associated Press, which, in turn, sold news service to subscribers. In one sense, the real meaning of this form of the electric, instant coverage was concealed by the mechanical overlay of the visual and industrial patterns of print and printing.

“It was early discovered that when the wind at Montreal was from the East or North-East, rain storms traveled from the West, and the stronger the land current, the faster came the rain from the opposite direction.” It is clear that telegraph, by providing a wide sweep of instant information, could reveal meteorological patterns of force quite beyond observation by pre-electric man.

The invention of the typewriter has given a tremendous impetus to the dictating habit … This means not only greater diffuseness … but it also brings forward the point of view of the one who speaks. There is the disposition on the part of the talker to explain, as if watching the facial expression of his hearers to see how far they are following. This attitude is not lost when his audience is following. It is no uncommon thing in the typewriting booths at the Capitol in Washington to see Congressmen in dictating letters use the most vigorous gestures as if the oratorical methods of persuasion could be transmitted to the printed page.

A modern battleship needs dozens of typewriters for ordinary operations. An army needs more typewriters than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the field, suggesting that the typewriter now fuses the functions of the pen and sword.

Northcote Parkinson had discovered that any business or bureaucratic structure functions by itself, independently of “the work to be done.” The number of personnel and “the quality of the work are not related to each other at all.” In any given structure, the rate of staff accumulation is not related to the work done but to the intercommunication among the staff, itself. (In other words, the medium is the message.) Mathematically stated, Parkinson’s Law says that the rate of accumulation of office staff per annum will be between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

The historian Daniel Boorstin was scandalized by the fact that celebrity in our information age was not due to a person’s having done anything but simply to his being known for being well known. Professor Parkinson is scandalized that the structure of human work now seems to be quite independent of any job to be done.

The readers of the New York Evening Telegram were told in 1904: “Phony implies that a thing so qualified has no more substance than a telephone talk with a supposititious friend.”

It is one of the ironies of Western man that he has never felt any concern about invention as a threat to his way of life. The fact is that, from the alphabet to the motorcar, Western man has been steadily refashioned in a slow technological explosion that has extended over 2,500 years. From the time of the telegraph onward, however, Western man began to live an implosion. He began suddenly with Nietzschean insouciance to play the movie of his 2,500-year explosion backward. But he still enjoys the results of the extreme fragmentation of the original components of his tribal life. It is this fragmentation that enables him to ignore cause-and-effect in all interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change.

The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.

In a radio speech in Munich, March 14, 1936, Hitler said, “I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist.” His victims and his critics have been equally somnambulistic.

When equipped with the new experimental head-cameras that follow their eye movements while watching the image, children keep their eyes on the faces of the TV actors. Even during physical violence their eyes remain concentrated on the facial reactions, rather than on the eruptive action. Guns, knives, fists, all are ignored in preference for the facial expression. TV is not so much an action, as a re-action, medium.

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. Instead of the voting bloc, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. In periods of new and rapid growth there is a blurring of outlines.

America long ago achieved its Common Market by mechanical and literate homogenization of social organization. Europe is now getting a unity under the electric auspices of compression and interrelation.

The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement, and he cannot accept a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or destiny in learning or in life.

Politics has gone international. The British Labor Leader is here campaigning for Prime Minister of Britain, and fairly soon John F. Kennedy will be over in Italy and Germany campaigning for reelection. Everybody’s now whistle-stopping through somebody else’s country, usually ours. Washington has still not adjusted to this third-man role. It keeps forgetting that anything said here may be used by one side or another in some election campaign, and that it may, by accident, be the decisive element in the final vote.

The city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a collective shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins.

The city, like a ship, is a collective extension of the castle of our skins, even as clothing is an extension of our individual skins. But weapons proper are extensions of hands, nails, and teeth, and come into existence as tools needed for accelerating the processing of matter.

By militarism, Rome extended civilization or individualism, literacy, and lineality to many oral and backward tribes.