Product Description

Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55042 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'McLuhan sings of the furthest reaches of electronic culture, when computer technology has replaced language with instant nonverbal communication.' - Wired

The Director of the Center for the Study of the Extensions of Man at the University of Toronto, Marshall MoLuhan here investigates the psychic and social consequences of technological media on man and his societies. The medium itself, rather than the content, is the message, he asserts, and turns to inspect the manner in which it affects us. He extends his inquiry beyond the expected media of print, radio, television, telephone to include "the mechanical bride" - the automobile, clothing - "our extended skin," money, clocks, housing. He differentiates between the cool and hot media, the former leaving more for the participant or user to do, the latter more comprehensive in its content - and indicates how these affect diversely the tribal or the individualistic culture. His insights into the nature of our society, the role the media play in it, the meaning of media, the actualities of the cold war (again that temperature reading is important) are provocative and brilliant. The printed word, however, is a cold medium, and this book requires concentrated reader application for reward. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
'He belongs to that small group of radical dreamers and thinkers who are trying to realize and explore the altered conditions of modern existence ... When the growth of post-Einsteinian mythologies is recorded, McLuhan's work will have its distinct place. He stands at the frontier.' - George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement

'Understanding Media is still the essential read on how the medium is, more and more, the message itself.' - Nicholas Lemann, Sunday Herald

'McLuhan sings of the furthest reaches of electronic culture, when computer technology has replaced language with instant nonverbal communication.' - Wired

From the Back Cover
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message" in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our 21st century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.

Customer Reviews

Not simple to remain critical at times
This book is the Bible of the mediatic electric age and it has to be read as such, that is to say with a grain of salt from time to time. Marshall McLuhan shows first of all that all inventions, all activities of man are extensions of something in his body: the hand, the arm, the foot, the eye, the nose, the ear, and of course the skin and the central nervous system. He then moves to showing that the mechanical age started with the wheel as the extension of man's feet and legs, when this wheel was plugged onto some mechanical source of energy, be it natural like stream-water, or be it man-made and artificial like the steam-engine or the internal-combustion-engine. But this very mechanical revolution produces the next stage since stream-water or steam are used to make a turbine turn, like a wheel, but this time to produce electricity. And we enter the electrical age, a revolution based on the virtualization of this energy that is no longer attached to a particular action or place: it can be used in hundreds of different tasks and everywhere due to its transportation. This leads to the next revolution: the birth of communication media, hot or cool, but all of them being the message itself. Radio, cinema, TV, camera, sound-recorder, etc..., and McLuhan could not know in 1964 the Internet revolution and virtual reality, the virtualization of all human activities. However, he feels and predicts the changes that were to come. Information can be transformed and transported by machines and the possession and use of knowledge become the real working power of a man. It means clearly that social projects are no longer collective but based on individual potential, competence and activity. We thus can shift from collective nationalism (the explosion of humanity into opposed and distinct fundamentally irrational though logical-looking groups corresponding to the mechanical revolution) to universal globalization that makes all human beings equal, necessary, useful in the knowledge they possess and can move or use. This vision of globalization has little to do with Marx's dream of communism and Marshall McLuhan is perfectly aware that this globalization is a process containing - and finding its inner energy from - contradictions, such as the two trends towards detribilization and retribilization. But Marshall McLuhan is best-known for his approach of radio-cinema-TV. He sees very well the differences between them. Radio, the hot extension of one sense, hearing. Cinema, the hot extension of two senses, hearing and sight. TV, the cool extension of all senses (synesthesia) that requires total and tactile contact. But here he is led astray by his natural optimism. He considers TV leads to participation, which is true, but he does not qualify it properly because he does not see the participation radio and cinema require. With TV the individual projects himself into the medium with which he merges in total osmosis. It is purely sensual or sensuous, hence entirely passive mentally. With radio and cinema the projection is that of the show onto the mental black and blank screen of the mind for this mind to compensate all the missing elements (all but sound with radio, quite a lot with cinema, and in both cases the necessary mind as the Buddhist sixth sense to provide all the connections necessary for full understanding). Here the participation is first of all mental and even intellectual. A hot media thus mobilizes the mind. A cool media mobilizes the sensual and sensuous senses, if not only sensations. This leads to the unanswered question about the Internet and Virtual Reality. A new synesthetic medium that is hot because it requires the user to take in his own hands all the parameters including his own definition: and sure enough he can assume one chosen persona or several chosen personae, just as much as he may have to pare off or negotiate the persona or personae that the personae he may meet there may project onto him. That's the hot medium of today already and tomorrow. The next stage is still pure science-fiction.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne.

visionary
This book should be essential to anyone involved in the media or pr. To think that it was written in 1964 is truly amazing. McLurhan grasps the true potential of the media and outlines the possibilities and power that control of the media gives. A true classic.