Understanding the Present, by Understanding Media

Designed as a guidebook into the nature and effects of today’s technologies, 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man' remains remarkably useful. Here are a few hints on how to make the most of it.

Let’s back up a little bit.

In the late 1950s Marshall McLuhan was given a grant from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB, Washington, DC) to create a high school curriculum for ‘understanding new media.’ ‘Report on Project in Understanding New Media’ (McLuhan, 1960) begins like this:

“Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained. Radio, for example, has an intense visual effect on listeners. But then there is the telephone which also proffers an auditory impression, but has no visual effect. In the same way television is watched but has a very different effect from movies. These observations led to a series of studies of the media, and to the discovery of basic laws concerning the sensory effects of various media. These will be found in this report.”

A few pages later:

“Nothing could be more unrealistic than to suppose that the programming for such media could affect their power to re-pattern the sense-ratios of our beings. It is the ratio among our senses which is violently disturbed by media technology.”

More than 60 years later, it seems to be catching on.

Jonathan Haidt, the latest high-profile person to discover McLuhan, recently published a note (‘Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring’) including the sentiment as it was rewritten for ‘Understanding Media’ in 1964:

The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.  Chapter 1, ‘The Medium is the Message,’ emphasis Haidt’s.

The 1960 Report, which has never been widely published (but you can find it here), didn’t really go anywhere. Marshall then spend the next four years rewriting it, publishing it through McGraw-Hill as ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’

There are a few things to know about this book to help make it more interesting, comprehensible, and useful.

Here are two:

The first is that the title is in the present tense:

this book is a guide to the present.

If you look at the table of contents, ‘Understanding Media’ is divided into two parts.

Part One is seven chapters, numerically (and not accidentally) corresponding to the Seven Liberal Arts of classical education. Like the seven liberal arts, each is a different way of seeing, a different perspective to bring to bear in exploring and understanding the world.

Part Two is a further twenty-six chapters, like the letters of the phonetic alphabet, and in these chapters McLuhan brings the methods from Part One to bear on specific technologies from the spoken word, to automation, and including money, games, clothing – things not traditionally considered ‘media.’ For McLuhan, media are not just means of communicating ‘messages.’ A medium is ‘any extension of ourselves,’ anything we make and use to extend what we can do. That includes a fork or an air conditioner as much as it does an iPhone. Our world with or without either is a very different world, as we are very different people.

“the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each new extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Chapter 1, ‘The Medium is the Message.’

“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.”

Chapter 1, ‘The Medium is the Message.’

A second thing to understand about this book

is that it is more like a book of poetry

than a conventional work of fiction or non-fiction.

Don’t be fooled by format.

It may be long on sentences,

and short on paragraph breaks,

but make no mistake: this is poetry.

It should probably be no surprise, given that Marshall McLuhan was a literary critic and English Literature teacher for his entire career, with heroes like Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It would probably be weirder if he wrote plain prose. He wrote the way he did very deliberately, with an audience and an effect front of mind. Many complained that he couldn’t write very well, and many of them were unable to read very well. Most of the complainers were unable or unwilling to meet the work on its own terms and, not surprisingly, didn’t get very far with it.

How you approach a book matters. Contrary to the opinion of many a frustrated reader, the book and author do not assume that you recognize and immediately identify every reference made. You are, however, invited to participate by being a more active reader than you are perhaps used to.

There is a good reason for this approach, namely, that there is much to learn, and that learning is (always) your responsibility. Like any tool. If you want to learn how to use it, it’s going to require some work. I can put it in your hands and tell you it’s a screwdriver, or a plane, or a pencil – but if you want to do anything with it, you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and do some work.

If readers approach ‘Understanding Media’ like a book of poetry, as it more closely resembles poetry than prose, it quickly becomes obvious that this is a better method.

You read poetry and prose differently. You expect different things from them. Importantly, they expect different things from you, and do different things for (and to) you. If you haven’t thought about books (or media in general) this way, I’d suggest mulling those three sentences over for a day or two. It’s the essence of ‘the medium is the message.’

‘Understanding Media’ could not only change the way you think about the nature and effects of technologies, it could change you. Whether that change is a good thing or not is another question: be warned that once you look beyond the content level of things, and understand how media shape and reshape you personally and us all socially, there’s no going back.

This is what McLuhan was getting at, talking about content being ‘the juicy piece of meat’ carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. T.S. Eliot brought this up in 1933 with:

“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the house-dog. “
— T.S. Eliot — ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’ [Harvard University Press, 1933]

Eliot and McLuhan are saying the same thing: the medium is the message.

No, neither McLuhan nor Eliot are saying that content, or meaning, don’t matter. Are unimportant. Are irrelevant. People get oddly defensive about this point.

People can be moved by a passionate speech, and influential book, a persuasive ad, but when you add up individual and social changes, they are much less the result of content than of form.

Content can change your mind, media change your being.

Here are some selected quotes to that effect:

“Western Man is an easy victim of the new technology when he slips into the habit of appraising media situations in terms of their ‘content.’”

‘Report on Project in Understanding New Media’ 1960

“Obsession with ‘content’ seems infallibly to obscure the structural changes effected by media.”

‘Project in Understanding New Media’ 1p overview, 1959

“Very few people know what ‘the medium is the message’ means, because they’ve never asked. The medium is the thing that changes. The program doesn’t, the content doesn’t, but the medium is always changing because it is the ground itself.

Monday Night Seminar, February 5^th, 1973 (listen here)

“It is the medium itself that is the message… It literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on an atomic bomb.”

‘Playboy’ magazine interview, March 1969.

“In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not whether it turned our cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology.”

Chapter 1, ‘The Medium is the Message.’

Paradoxically, content is the delivery mechanism for change.

Futile as it is, we would rather shoot the messenger

than look too closely at the medium.

It takes a bit of detective work to track down these references, and no small amount of brain cells burned to make sense of it all when you do, but for those willing to make the voyage, as Shackleton promised, the rewards are great.

All that should give you a huge head start in reading Understanding Media and using it to understand what’s happening today.

But if you don’t want to do it alone, join me:

In 2020 I set out to lead a group of people through Part One of ‘Understanding Media.’ Together, over ten weeks, I read every word aloud, chased every rabbit down its hole. We discussed what these things meant in McLuhan’s time, and we applied the principles to the technology of the day.

Today, Part One of ‘Understanding Media’ again offers its seven powerful perspectives from which to view the nature and action of AI. Seven ways to explore what it is. Seven ways to understand what it is doing, what it will do. What we will gain, what we will lose. Who we are and who we will become.

Ten Monday nights, beginning April 15^th, with Understanding Media as our guide, we will set out on an exploration. This will be my third time leading a group through and each time has been remarkable, each time has been different. Different mix of people, different mix of media. The groups, made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds from around the world, from students to retired professors, people who have studied and taught media and McLuhan, people who have barely heard of him. People who design technology, people who use the latest technology, people who would prefer not to. We all learn together and from each other.

I’m really pleased to be partnering with San Francisco’s Gray Area for a third time to bring this course to the world. If you’ve read this far, maybe you’re interested in going a little deeper, and if that’s the case then I’d love to have you with us in our ten-week suite of ‘Monday Night Seminars.’ More details, and registration, here.