21L.015   Introduction to Media Studies:  Syllabus | Classes | Labs | Papers | Resources

CORE DEFINITIONS 1: MCLUHAN

QUOTATIONS FROM UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

THE MYTH OF NARCISSUS: THE GADGET-LOVER
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to the extensions of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves (43-44). Index
 
MEDIA AS EXTENSIONS OF MAN
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth (46).

Media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves (53). Index

NUMBNESS
The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. thus the age of anxiety and of electronic media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy (47).

It has now been explained that media, or extensions of man, are 'make happen' agents, but not 'make aware' agents. The hybridizing or compounding of these agents offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties....They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all (48-49).

The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed....Our conventional responses to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of the medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind (18).

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses (55). Index

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
It is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology (7).

The content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph (8).

The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human associations. Indeed, it is only too typical that the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium (9). Index

MEDIA AS ALTERING CONSCIOUSNESS
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we have extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man -- the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as have already extended our senses and our nerves by various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought be advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex (4). Index
 
HOT AND COLD MEDIA
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, 'high definition.' A cartoon is 'low definition,' simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information.. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience....A lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue....The hot form excludes, and the cool one includes (23). Index
 
THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree (5).

The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence upon the rest of human society....Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society. So what is to be done? Do we dare to confront such fears at the conscious level, or is it best to becloud and repress such matters until some violence releases us from the entire burden? (51). Index

MEDIA AS METAPHORS
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant (57).

The typewriter fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word....Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the manner of the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as composition.... The machine is like a public address system immediately at hand. He can shout or whisper or whistle and make funny typographic faces at the audience (260). Index

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995 [1964]).

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