McLuhanism is in short, the idea that media has inherent effects owing to physical characteristics of the medium. To McLuhan, the content of the media is much less important than the media itself when examining it’s effect on society overall.
Part I takes you through concepts relevant to McLuhan’s analyses, which make up Part II, where each chapter focuses on a particular sort of media. One may be surprised at first by what we examine: words, roads, numbers, clothes, clocks, and then moving on to things such as telegraphs, telephones, radio, and television. Those first kinds of media help to give one an intuitive grasp of how objects in our world serve to extend our faculties, to alter our perception, and to shift our mindset. Of prime importance in McLuhanism are the alphabet and printed word technologies, which create a linear, hierarchical worldview; he believes that electric media will have the opposite effects, by involving us in nonlinear, inclusive, and deeper ways. The chapter on the clock was a breakthrough moment for me, where the consequences of electric speedup became clear all at once, and the ‘global village’ made sense.
McLuhan’s understanding of the involvement of electric media might be the most significant foreshadowing moment any person has achieved. I was impressed that he saw through the state of media such as television or radio, which were always run by central organizations broadcast to people, and saw that electric media could bring forth a non-hierarchical order, as our Internet is. Now, though there is great organisation in the infrastructure of the Internet, I don’t believe this is inherent to the medium, given that any person has a computer which on the network level, can operate non-hierarchically as yet another server.
More significant than his thoughts on media now outdated, such as the telegraph, gramophone, or television [1], is his analytical approach, which if the reader can wield themselves, will open a new dimension to their understanding of the world. It’s important because we not only have new forms of media that dominate the world, but subtle changes to existing media. The aforementioned television is one that has changed greatly, and film as well, by the technologies involved in the distribution and display of film. The gramophone is not even comparable to the portable music-playing smartphone. Instant text messaging is a whole other medium. Most of all, we now have video games, which are a radically new medium that has rocketed to the top of public consciousness. What I would give to know what McLuhan would have thought about video games today! But by following his thought process, we can do our own analyses and discover what he could have thought.
Reading this book has radically changed my view of media as a whole, and as media saturates our world today, this is a subject of prime importance. For this reason, I consider his work to be the most personally influential and important I have read this year. I recommend it to anyone, not just interested in media, but has any concern with society, technology, and their interactions.
- Television is today, more similar to film, as contemporary television has equal visual fidelity, is not constrained to broadcast technology received by a small cube. The experience of the old tube television is critical to McLuhan’s analysis.