Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time,

Our old industrialized areas, having eroded their oral traditions automatically, are in the position of having to rediscover them in order to cope with the electric age.

hot media treatment cannot include much empathy or participation at any time.

amplifications of the unconscious cultural bias

A caterpillar gazing at the butterfly is supposed to have remarked, “Waal, you’ll never catch me in one of those durn things.”

“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”

railways require a uniform political and economic space. On the other hand, airplane and radio permit the utmost discontinuity and diversity in spatial organization.

the great principle of classical physics and economics and political science, namely that of the divisibility of each process, has reversed itself by sheer extension into the unified field theory;

automation in industry replaces the divisibi...

commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information,

break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return

the total field.

all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium.

With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.

any medium at once affects the entire field of the senses,

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.

hoicked

think things out before we put them out.

this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out.

why not use the actual earth as a map of itself?

Our private and corporate lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology.

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born.

The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.

technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another

Translation is thus a “spelling-out” of forms of knowledge.

All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.

all forms of employment become “paid learning,” and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information.

man, as Julian Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to store experience.

money is also a metaphor.

percussed

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

A case to Callaghan was merely a collection of people, some of whom — all of whom — were giving incorrect information, or telling lies, because circumstances either forced them or led them into the process. But the fact that they had to tell lies, had to give false impressions, necessitated a reorientation of their own viewpoints and their own lives. Sooner or later they became exhausted or careless. Then, and not until then, was an investigator able to put his finger on the one fact that would lead him to a possible logical solution.

the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing

how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensable to their masters.

Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to meet new challenge.

The implosion of electric energy in our century cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers.

“More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline

It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.

manufacture by mono-fracture,

The spoken word does not afford the extension and amplification of the visual power needed for habits of individualism and privacy.

The literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting in any matter with considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.

uttering (outering)

Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers.

the marks on the pages were trapped words

electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word.

Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words “American flag” across a piece of cloth and to display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning, the effect would be quite different.

There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.

Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear,

the ideogram is an inclusive gestalt, not an analytic dissociation of senses and functions like phonetic writing.

consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness.