I was recommended this book a lot, but when I finally read it I was extremely disappointed. It wasn’t mediocre, it was actually bad; it’s a self-aggrandizing display, a pompous show of bad aphorisms. The author makes remark after remark he takes to be fact, but does not try convince us of anything; he merely presents his thoughts and the reader must accept them as they are. I can’t tell what his goal is with this book because obviously it isn’t to teach or convince the reader.
Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man.
This is a very important point in the book, especially how he brings up primitive pre-alphabet societies, but lets turn the statement around; is a spoken conversation not uniform, continuous, and connected? We do progress through conversation linearly through time after all, if anything, text should be less continuous and connected because you can read out of order, or present ideas in parallel using marginal or footnotes. Maybe I am wrong on this and misunderstand what he means, but how should I know? He makes no attempt to address an argument like this. Most of the book rests on this idea so if I fundamentally disagree with it, there is little point reading more of it.
The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man’s desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.
What remains of the configuration of former “cities” will be very much like World’s Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence.*
The ear favors no particular point of view. […] We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”
Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.
I feel no need to explain why these quotes are so false.
These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!
Here, I’d like to draw attention to how demonstrably poor this observation is, even while considering that I have the benefit of hindsight. In 1914, “The war to end all wars” was a phrase describing The Great War, retrospectively the First World War. it was similarly thought that the horrors of war were so terrible we may never fight again. Mere decades later, the Second World War came. In 1967 when this book was published, they were halfway through the Vietnam war. If McLuhan were a thinker, he’d consider that in the recent past people made similar observations and they were proven wrong, thus he cannot in good mind say this for sure.
There is the general observation underlying the book that can be put as ’the tools that you use, or the tools at your disposal, will guide the way you think’, which is an important idea. It does not save this book in any way. It wasn’t a new idea to me anyway.
Overall, this book was a waste of time, albeit not much time because it was a brief read. For you my reader, if anyone recommends this book to you, do yourself a favor; just nod and say “Mmhmm yes, I will certainly get around to having a look at it later”, and then immediately forget it.
I usually give authors two chances. Maybe this was just an off book, maybe I was supposed to be acquainted with McLuhan before reading this. Because his topics are of interest to me, I will probably read another book by him in the future.