Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

fragmenting himself in this way

After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies,

electric media.

electric technology.

Spectator becomes artist in oriental art because he must supply all the connections.

any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment.

Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.

the tribal encyclopedia.

With the phonetic alphabet, classified wisdom took over from the operational wisdom of Homer and Hesiod and the tribal encyclopedia.

Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.

The famous Hawthorne experiment, at the General Electric plant near Chicago, revealed a mysterious effect years ago. No matter how the conditions of the workers were altered, the workers did more and better work.

when the workers are permitted to join their energies to a process of learning and discovery, the increased efficiency is phenomenal.

the new electric environment.

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control,

the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves,

The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology.

The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.

the “content” of any medium is always another medium.

the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

“the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

A fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare.

In modern thought, (if not in fact) Nothing is that doesn’t act, So that is reckoned wisdom which Describes the scratch but not the itch.

media study considers not only the “content” but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates.

mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series.

that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance.

Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration?

Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field,

total field,

whole pattern,

In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak, is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle.

any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary.

“Rational,” of course, has for the West long meant “uniform and continuous and sequential.”

The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology.

The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.

the typographic spell.

a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.

Stress on a few major staples creates extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population.

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.”

Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one,

the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.

any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated.

When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind.

Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.

Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock.

The Hebrew and Eastern mode of thought tackles problem and resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a way typical of oral societies in general.

The entire message is then traced and retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral with seeming redundancy.

the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight.