Status
Available
Call number
Publication
New York : McGraw-Hill, 1973.
Description
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 twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Yes Marshall, we are entering a new tribalism, of course we are, where "hot" media that allow of less participation because they make more of the connections for you are being supplanted by "cool" media that allow of more engagement/immersion. Are these the most useful possible terms? Especially
There is scads to discuss here but half of it is just disagreeing with his terminology and the other half is trying to bend it till it works. But that doesn't matter, because in the future we'll all have personal robots beaming up cool images that will obviate the individual mind in some unspecified way, and we'll all work together and be like the "savages" again. Or at least, we'll all have tenure.
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when you find that print is "hot" and TV is "cool", but movies are "hot", along with radio and photographs, and in contrast to cool comics. The internet? Unanticipated. And what does it mean that the less engaging media are the ones that, we are to understand, allow for more interpretative space? How is that hot?There is scads to discuss here but half of it is just disagreeing with his terminology and the other half is trying to bend it till it works. But that doesn't matter, because in the future we'll all have personal robots beaming up cool images that will obviate the individual mind in some unspecified way, and we'll all work together and be like the "savages" again. Or at least, we'll all have tenure.
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LibraryThing member george.d.ross
McLuhan raises a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship of media to culture, but is frustratingly haphazard about following through on any of them. I can deal with him making oracular pronouncements with zero evidence to back them up, but it would be nice if he at least carried his ideas a
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little further, examined culture a little more closely... But I don't know, maybe it's not fair to blame a man for not being Foucault. Show Less
LibraryThing member uqbar
(Sep 2006) I was led to look up McLuhan through a number of online sources and reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he credits McLuhan as a major influence.
Reading Understanding Media is drinking from the firehose. McLuhan bursts with ideas, essentially reinterpreting human
I would very much like to find more recent research that takes up McLuhan's program and attempts to sort the wheat from the chaff. McLuhan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, of which there is little in this volume. The modern field of media studies seems to have veered in a different direction... but perhaps I haven't found the right books yet.
Reading Understanding Media is drinking from the firehose. McLuhan bursts with ideas, essentially reinterpreting human
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history through the lens of communication technology and its broader influence on culture. He famously says, "The medium is the message," i.e. content has less impact than form.I would very much like to find more recent research that takes up McLuhan's program and attempts to sort the wheat from the chaff. McLuhan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, of which there is little in this volume. The modern field of media studies seems to have veered in a different direction... but perhaps I haven't found the right books yet.
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LibraryThing member petergiger
McLuhan is one of the few thinkers in the 20th century to search outside the normal frames of critical thinking. Even if the media he's talking about is outdated, his discourse is always up-to-date.
LibraryThing member amanda_c
Interesting ideas about media. I don't always agree with them, but they always get me thinking.
LibraryThing member TeeMcp
McLuhan has a reputation for being difficult to understand. I think those of us who grew up in the last decades of the 20th century may find it less so, if only because his ideas informed so much of the technology we grew up with. That being said, there are many passages of the book that will
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require a second or third pass before they make sense. Show Less
LibraryThing member brockportcelt
Originally published in 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man launched Marshall McLuhan onto the world stage, and saw him become one of the most public intellectuals of all time. In this daring text, Marshall McLuhan takes interpretation to new heights, exploring the implications of
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technologies like radio and television, telephone and telegraph, games, clothing and money - all media of communication impacting the social order. What McLuhan actually challenges us to do is to plunge with him into what he calls "the creative process of knowing". Show Less
LibraryThing member jasoncomely
Original and urgent warning of mass media's effects.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
Dr. McLuhan gave us a group of insights into the transition from getting our information primarily from the print mediums to the screen exposed information bath of today. The epigrams are on the money, and so is the overall message. How we get our information has a serious effect on the way our
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brains process and retain the information. Into the bargain the medium necessarily transforms the information it tries to transmit. This book is still worth reading, and paying attention to the point of view, as well as the portrait of the pre-internet age , will be helpful for the ages to come. Show Less
LibraryThing member mykl-s
A book that stood out from all the others I was reading at the time. It helped me put advertising and newspapers and radio-TV into perspective.
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1964
ISBN
0070454353 / 9780070454354