Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Marshall McLuhan, 1964
online link [here] (50th Anniversary reissue? 2014)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

pg. 10 - 'The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message...unless it is use to spell out some verbal ad or name.'

'This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium.'

'The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.'

'An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.'

'What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes.'

'For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.'

'Let us return to the electric lights. When the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some ways the "content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light.'

'This fact merely underlines the point that "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 or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association...it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.'

pg. 16 - 'De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation.'

'The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.'

'The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions.'

pg. 17 - '..."Rational", of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.'

pg. 18 - 'If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic.'

pg. 19 - 'Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.'

pg. 20 - 'Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown.'

pg. 22 - 'Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.'

MEDIA COLD AND HOT

pg. 30 - 'A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data.'

'...And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.'

'On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.'

pg. 31 - '...Therefore a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.'

'A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.'

'The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.'

'But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal empire over many lives.'

'Any hot medium allows for less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.'

'With print many earlier forms were exclude from life and art, and many were given strange new intensity.'

pg. 32 - 'The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure.'

pg. 35 - 'In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The "city slicker" is hot, and the rustic is cool.'

HYBRID ENERGY

pg. 65 - 'The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word.'

'The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce'

pg. 67 - 'The hybrid of the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of Narcissus-narcosis.'

'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.'

MEDIA AS TRANSLATORS

pg. 69 - 'All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.'

'The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.'

'Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed.'

'Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness.'

'In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.'

CHALLENGE AND COLLAPSE

pg. 74 - 'It was Bertrand Russell who declared the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement.'

NOTE: 'Suspended judgment is a cognitive process and a rational state of mind in which one withholds judgments, particularly on the drawing of moral or ethical conclusions.' (Wikipedia 20.11.17)

(Could relate to subversion, as the need to reach a defined end point or a clear meaning is removed, you aren't presented with all of the information, it's not necessary to your understanding or your experience of what's in front of you)

THE SPOKEN WORD

pg. 94 - '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.
To translate the rich visual mosaic of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience...'

THE PRINT

pg. 177 - 'We are confronted here once more with that basic function of media - to store and to expedite information.'

'The fact that visual information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally also points to the fact that science in the Western world has long been dependent on the visual factor.'

'Well before Gutenberg's development of printing from movable types, a great deal of printing on paper by woodcut had been done. Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text and image had been in the form of Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor.'

'Printers in this woodcut sense preceded typographic printers, though by just how long a period is not easy to establish, because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned, were not preserved any more than are the comic books of today.'

pg. 179 - 'It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object.'

'The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data about objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at...'

pg. 182 - '...in the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit.'

'As the retinal impressions intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead, become "contained" in a uniform, continuous and "rational" space.'

COMICS

pg. 184 - 'The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today.'

'Comics (as already explained in the chapter on The Print), being low in definition, are a highly participational form of expression...'

pg. 186 - 'Picasso has long been a fan of American comics. The highbrow, from Joyce to Picasso, has long been devoted to American popular art because he finds in it an authentic imaginative reaction to official action.'

pg. 188 - 'The first comic book appeared in 1935. Not having anything connected or literary about them, and being as difficult to decipher as the Book of Kells, they caught on with the young.'

'The elders of the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could hardly be expected to notice that the comic books were as exotic as eighth-century illuminations.'