Important Books: Understanding Media

Marshall McLuhan holding a mirror in 1967.

Photograph by John Reeves through the Library and Archives Canada. Reference: 1980-194, PA-165118, MIKAN 4170003. Some rights reserved.

Marshall McLuhan changed the trajectory of media studies.

During the mid-twentieth century, McLuhan was a Professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. While there, he wrote a number of books that advanced several key concepts critical to modern theories of media, though some of his ideas would not become widely accepted until the spread and adoption of Internet technologies.

In 1964, McLuhan's seminal book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, would launch the professor into the international spotlight. A younger generation thirsty for radical new ideas would embrace his work as prophetic. The established media and academic cultures, however, were more critical of his work. Both would frequently misinterpret his writing.

The main thesis of Understanding Media was that media can be assessed independent of content – that the form a communications medium takes is what determines how it will be used. The first chapter, titled “The Medium is the Message,” opened with a summary of this process: “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Concurrent with this theme was another, more prophetic notion: that humanity is in transition between two major periods: the print era and the electric age. McLuhan saw the ability of electricity to deliver instantaneous information as the beginning of a paradigm shift that would cause people to slough off the fragmentation and mechanization engendered by the printed word while reconnecting with their tribal roots in a wider “global village” (a term McLuhan coined).

The second half of McLuhan's book tackled individual forms of media and their different impacts on life and culture. He pointed out, for instance, that literary-minded people who are accustomed to linear arguments and cohesive storytelling misunderstand the press, which, he noted, has tended “not to the book form, but to the mosaic or participational form...not a detached 'point of view,' but participation in process.”

In addition to books, television, and other formats that are traditionally thought of as media, McLuhan included chapters on cars, clocks, and electric light.

Ironically, Understanding Media can be difficult to understand, with passages that are at times dense and esoteric. Rather than approach the field in a systematic fashion, McLuhan often embedded his ideas in analogies and anecdotes. As Lewis H. Lapham describes in his introduction to the 1994 MIT Press edition, “quite a few of the notions to which he [McLuhan] off-handedly refers in the early pages, as if everybody already knew what he meant, he doesn't bother to explain until the later pages, often by way of an afterthought or an aside.”

Predictions about the coming electric age were one of the most controversial aspects of Understanding Media. McLuhan, who identified himself as a product of the literary world, nevertheless insisted that that the power of print would soon be overtaken by fundamentally different electric technologies.

Some predictions came true, such as his suggestion that televisions would become common in the classroom and shift the emphasis of education to reflect new expectations about becoming involved with processes, rather than simply learning about them. Other prognostications were slightly off the mark, such as the assertion that the car would be replaced by “electrical successors” within ten years.

McLuhan's predictions for the electric age were unpalatable to some for at least two major reasons. First of all, the dominant media and academic institutions of the time had built their legacies through print media, which McLuhan seemed to claim were doomed.

The second reason for skepticism is more understandable: many of the changes he foresaw were as yet barely imaginable. The first desktop computer was a decade away, and commercial Internet Service Providers wouldn't appear for more than twenty years. Cell phones, video games and Facebook were the stuff of science fiction.

Despite McLuhan's initial fame, much of his work lost traction during the 1970's. It would not be until a generation later that his books would get a fresh look – and now, with a burgeoning online culture, would make a lot more sense.

In fact, McLuhan's once-radical insight into how the forms of media shape our lives is a widely accepted, much-discussed topic today, and is obvious to anyone who has witnessed the changes wrought by Microsoft, Apple or Google. McLuhan, it turns out, truly was ahead of his time.