Seven Ways of Understanding Media

Part one of a seven part series looking at the first seven chapters as tools or methods of exploring the nature and effects of today's (and tomorrow's) technologies.

Over the last four years I’ve read Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 masterwork ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ very closely several times. I’ve led two groups of students through it cover to cover, word by word, and have discovered some amazing things.

Every time I read it, it feels like a different book. The main reason for that is, I feel, that things in our world are changing so quickly that when the book is put up against the world, it is put up against a different world. The world has changed, as have we.

More than anything else, I see this book as a field guide to technology and technological change. A way of exploring and (as the title states) understanding the ‘psychic and social’ or individual and collective ‘consequences’ of human innovation – the main point being that we and our world are greatly changed by the technologies we develop and use, that (as William Blake and John Culkin noted) ‘we become what we behold: we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

In a previous work published here in several parts, Maelstrom Escape Strategies, I noted the remarkable change in Marshall McLuhan’s belief about how much agency was possible when it comes to us humans and our technologies. He went from believing that the forces at work are too complex to be able to predict and control, to a certainty that nothing is inevitable as long as we’re willing to contemplate the situation, or as he wrote in a 1966 letter to Time magazine:

“Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technology makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation.”

What changed McLuhan’s mind about the relative comprehensibility of human technology and whether we can do anything to intervene and control our destiny proceeding from its effects is that, basically, he looked deeply into it. What he found was complex, but not hopelessly so. That we needn’t be either hopeless or helpless. ‘Understanding Media’ is really his contribution toward taking charge.

“We can, if we choose, think things out before we put them out.”

This is the basis thesis of ‘Media Ecology’, from the McLuhan tradition.

As I have pointed out in previous Newsletters, McLuhan lays out what anyone else might put on the dustjacket, or at least in the introduction, in chapter 5, page 51 (in this text, I’m using the first edition):

“The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy.” (p. 51)

This is a wild premise for a book. He states that media are born of and give rise to conflict, and that the book offers the promise of higher human autonomy by trying to understand many media. That’s a fairly major claim.

Cheat code: If you look at the table of contents for the book, you see it’s two parts. Part One is seven chapters, each a different way of exploring, probing, technology. Part Two basically takes the first seven chapters or general principles and applies them to ‘many media,’ to specific technologies from the spoken word to housing, clothing, telephone, television, and finally, to ‘automation.’

“Environment as cause” “Content = another medium” Marshall McLuhan’s annotations in his 1st edition copy of Understanding Media.

Over the next several newsletters, I want to give you the essence of the first seven chapters of Understanding Media, which basically form seven ways of exploring the nature and effects of any human innovation in order to increase your and our autonomy.

We’ll take it a piece at a time because they are big dense pieces which are not easy to digest. Indeed, sixty years later, we’re still chewing on them.

I think we need to work a little harder because as we create ever more powerful technologies, the need to take more care in their shaping becomes proportionately more urgent.

For my part, given that we’ve got seven weeks to the end of the year, and that I’ve been under-delivering a bit with my volume of these newsletters, I’ll bang out these seven summaries in the time left in 2024, beginning with:

1. The Medium is the Message.

This is the basic unit of understanding how the overwhelming majority of individual and social changes resulting from technology come less from their content than their form, and how we, and our cultures, our societies, are changed as a result of the introduction of the new form.

Does this mean content doesn’t have any effect? No. It means that a world with mobile phones is a fundamentally different one from a world without them, and the difference comes not so much from what we say on a phone call, what we type in a text, whether we google directions to a store or a friend’s house. The content carries the effect, the message carries the medium.

“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 any new technology.” (p.7)

and

“The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change in scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (p.8)

The ‘message’, or the thing which is transmitted, is ultimately the change resulting from the new scale or pace or pattern. The message is who we have become, the message is difference between who we were and who we are.

Marshall McLuhan was interested mainly in these two orders, the ‘personal and social consequences’ of technology, that is, their end effects. He also here tells you one thing he learned about media, namely, that they are extensions or amplifications of some part of ourselves. (He later restated that more succinctly as ‘extensions of human powers’ which is also much easier on today’s sensibility and/or sensitivity than ‘extensions of man.’)

Over the millennia, we have slowly been artificially extending each of our abilities, our powers, through our technologies. McLuhan speculated that

“rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought after by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such a question about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” (p. 3-4)

Unpacking that is a whole other post. They key part for this discussion is the last sentence: that any technology or artificial extension of any part of us, affects the sum total of us individually and socially. Environments are whole, dynamic.

“’The medium is the message’ means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created.” (p. vii)

We cost of who we are is who we were.

Another way of saying ‘the medium is the message’ is to say ‘the environment is the message.’ So in terms of what’s happening right now, the sorts of questions this chapter poses are: how is this environment different? How is it changed? How is it changing? What do these changes mean to the previous environment which is now the content of the new environment? Can it survive intact?

Shortly after settling on this environmental understanding of and approach to technology, McLuhan realized that an ecological approach is also possible, if not necessary.

My object here is to give you my perspective of one way to read this chapter of this book – more than that, a way to use this chapter of this book today for more than entertainment or study. (And that goes for all seven of the first chapters).

The reason this is a different book today than it will be tomorrow is when it is used as a perspective, or series of perspectives through which to explore the changing state of our selves and our world.

Up Next: 2. Media Hot and Cold

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