Marshall Mcluhan - Understanding Media.pdf - Communication - sinderella

Marshall McLuhan

Understanding Media

The Extensions of Man

Part I, Chapters 1-7

Introduction

James Reston wrote in The New York Times (July 7, 1957):

A health director... reported this week that a small mouse,

which presumably had been watching television, attacked a

little girl and her full-grown cat... Both mouse and cat

survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder

that things seem to be changing.

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies,

the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in

space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central

nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is

concerned. 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 our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long

sought 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 questions 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.

Introduction /4

Some of the principal extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences,

are studied in this book. Just how little consideration has been given to such matters in the past

can be gathered from the consternation of one of the editors of this book. He noted in dismay that

"seventy-five per cent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than

ten per cent new." Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when the stakes are

very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent

by the hour.

In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern.

Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today

the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and

integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of

the pre-electric age.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The

advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be

quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of

carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment

was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age, when our central nervous system is

technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of

mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is

no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

Introduction /5

The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action

who appears not to be involved in the action. Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett's

clowns. After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and

alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by

dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in

bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human

awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position

of the Negro, the teenager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained , in the

political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks

to the electric media.

This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and

participation, quite regardless of any "point of view." The partial and specialized character of the

viewpoint, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the

same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint. If

the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's

couch. As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative

absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being. The psychiatrist employs the

couch, since it removes the temptation to express private points of view and obviates the need to

rationalize events.

Introduction /6

The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of

electric technology. The age of mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of

private outlook the natural mode of expression. Every culture and every age has its favorite

model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and every thing.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have

things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new

attitude - a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith in which this

book has been written. It explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies,

seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to

win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at

them anew, accepting very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. One can say of

media as Robert Theobald has said of economic depressions: "There is one additional factor that

has helped to control depressions, and that is a better understanding of their development."

Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be

preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with

the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.

The Medium Is the Message /7

1. The Medium Is the Message

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

it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium

is the message. This is merely to say that 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 extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example,

the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative

result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in

their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed.

Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the

machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our

relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out

cornflakes or Cadillacs. 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 Medium Is the Message /8

The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is

pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used 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. If it is asked, "What is the content of

speech?" it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal."

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. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or

wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human

functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened

whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent

of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating

the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association,

quite independently of what the airplane is used for.

Let us return to the electric light. Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night

baseball is a matter of indifference.

The Medium Is the Message /9

It could be argued that these activities are in some way 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. Indeed, it is only too typical that the

"content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries

have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. When IBM

discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but

that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.

The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light

bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in the

business of moving information.

The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content."

And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till

the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is

not the light but the "content" (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. The message of

the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and

decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time

and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV,

creating involvement in depth.

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

from Shakespeare. Some might quibble about whether or not he was referring to TV in these

familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It speaks, and yet says nothing.

The Medium Is the Message /10

In Othello, which, as much as King Lear, is concerned with the torment of people transformed by

illusions, there are these lines that bespeak Shakespeare's intuition of the transforming powers of

new media:

Is there not charms

By which the property of youth and maidhood

May be abus'd? Have you not read Roderigo,

Of some such thing?

In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to both a psychic and

social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political

navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation:

The providence that's in a watchful state

Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold,

Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,

Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods

Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.

The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite in dependently of their "content" or

programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza:

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.

The same kind of total, configurational awareness that reveals why the medium is socially the

message has occurred in the most recent and radical medical theories. In his Stress of Life, Hans

Selye tells of the dismay of a research colleague on hearing of Selye's theory:

When he saw me thus launched on yet another enraptured description of what I had

observed in animals treated with this or that impure, toxic material, he looked at me

with desperately sad eyes and said in obvious despair: "But Selye, try to realize what

you are doing before it is too late! You have now decided to spend your entire life

studying the pharmacology of dirt!" (Hans Selye, The Stress of Life)

The Medium Is the Message /11

As Selye deals with the total environmental situation in his "stress" theory of disease, so the

latest approach to media study considers not only the "content" but the medium and the cultural

matrix within which the particular medium operates. The older unawareness of the psychic and

social effects of media can be illustrated from almost any of the conventional pronouncements.

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General

David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the

scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in

themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice

of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor

bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither

good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in

themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is,

if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at

the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff

statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in

the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a

new technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print,

saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the

Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that

any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

The Medium Is the Message /12

Such economists as Robert Theobald, W. W. Rostow, and John Kenneth Galbraith have been

explaining for years how it is that "classical economics" cannot explain change or growth. And

the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and

change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the

understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by

putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century,

there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for

nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred

with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of

things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in

concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly

seemed that a chicken was an egg's idea for getting more eggs.

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