Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
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Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a book by Marshall McLuhan.
The book is the source of the phrase The medium is the message. It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures against increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.
Contents |
[edit] Summary
In Part One, McLuhan discusses the differences between hot and cold media and the ways that one medium translates the content of another medium. Briefly, "the content of a medium is always another medium."
In Part Two, McLuhan analyzes each medium (circa 1964) in a manner that exposes the form, rather than the content of each medium. In order, McLuhan covers The Spoken Word, The Written Word (as in a manuscript or incunabulum), Roads and Paper Routes, Numbers, Clothing, Housing, Money, Clocks, The Print (as in pictorial lithograph or woodcut), Comics, The Printed Word (as in Typography), Wheel, Bicycle and Airplane, The Photograph, The Press, Motorcar, Ads, Games, Telegraph, The Typewriter, The Telephone, The Phonograph, Movies, Radio, Television, Weapons, and Automation.
Throughout Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, McLuhan uses historical quotes and anecdotes to explain the ways in which new forms of media change the perceptions of societies, with specific focus on the form of each medium as opposed to the information that is transmitted by each medium. McLuhan examines television as an extension of the movie, with the exception that the visual quality of television as a medium is much less resolute than a movie as it would be seen in a theatre. Whereas a movie extends man's vision to a high degree and is thus "hot," a television image with less detail requires the viewer to fill in more details with their imagination and is therefore a "cool" medium.
[edit] Exploring theories
McLuhan's theories about "The medium is the message", link culture and society. The Internet, and the advent of the World Wide Web, are examples of what McLuhan would classify as hot media.
Each new form of media, according to the analysis of McLuhan, shapes messages differently thereby requiring new filters to be engaged in the experience of viewing and listening to those messages.
A less obvious example is terrorism. When terrorism is the medium, the underlying message is "I must be right because I'm willing to die for it".[citation needed]
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
Official website of the author.
