Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, a timeless work by Marshall McLuhan published in 1964, is a discussion of the various media and their effects on society and the individual. The book's publication transformed McLuhan from an English professor at the University of Toronto into a media celebrity. His writing not only gained attention and scrutiny in academic circles, but many of the ideas and phrases in the book also lodged themselves in the popular discourse, and McLuhan himself became a household name.

McLuhan defined media in the subtitle of the book as “The Extensions of Man.” For him, media include not only radio and TV, but also written words, clothing, money, and so on. McLuhan was interested in how media extend our auditory, visual, and tactile senses, as well as other capacities.

According to McLuhan, media not only extend but also alter and fix sense ratios. He often compared old media with new, noting how a new medium changed and fixed the senses ratios: “Each new impact shifts the ratios among all the senses.” The visual order of print, for example, structures a sequentially ordered thought. Electronic media, on the other hand, invite a form of thinking that is nonlinear, repetitive, discontinuous, and intuitive, proceeding by analogy instead of sequential argument.

McLuhan's famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” expresses his belief that the effect of a medium is not carried by its content, but rather in its format; every medium transmits a powerful message of its own in its format, above and beyond its content. The idea is easier to comprehend when we compare different media experiences while holding the content constant. For example, given the same piece of music, the experience generated from listening to a high-quality stereo system is different from that of listening to a Walkman.

Recognizing the interactive relationships between a medium and the social context of its use, McLuhan wrote, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” Humans construct new technologies, utilizing existing resources, in order to extend their various capacities. However, technologies have after- the-fact impacts on social relationships and sensory experiences.

Although Understanding Media was published in the 1960s, and the discussion was mainly about the electronic media, its ideas hold true for the technological developments in the 1980s and onward, and it shows relevance for understanding new media as well. Scholars, columnists, marketers, and critics continue to revisit and reflect on McLuhan's discussions to help them make sense of their environment, and to provide the vocabularies to describe it.

In his statement, “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village,” McLuhan contended that electronic media would create a global village in which matters would be shared by all. The idea of media as extensions of the human was useful for understanding live TV broadcasts (extending our auditory and visual senses) and the use of cellular phones (extending our auditory senses), both of which overcome spatial constraints. The phenomena of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Internet attest to the validity of McLuhan's “global village” idea. Although he died in 1979, too early to witness the development of CNN, the Internet, and wireless communications, his thoughts hold true for understanding these technological innovations, leading many to hail McLuhan as a visionary.

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