The Understanding Media Project
An introduction to the Marshall McLuhan's 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man' Project
One of the foundational memories of my childhood is the invasion of Iraq playing live on CNN in 2003. Their bold red logo stamped in the bottom left corner of the television screen with an emblazoned caption reading “Shock and Awe” with the main image being a dark, green and grainy image of Baghdad with occasional explosions in a city which brightened the screen.
It was a Wednesday night primetime. Most families were probably watching the popular sitcoms of the time: Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, Will and Grace, or Friends. The big dramas always played on Monday nights so no 24.
This war was eight time zones ahead of EST, yet, everyone saw the same images. Formed similar opinions. And seemed generally for it. Most of the prominent media heavyweights of the time wrote extensively in support of the war in the weeks and months leading up to it. David Brooks was for it. Christopher Hitchens was for it. Thomas Friedman was for it. Once it did finally happen, it felt like Christmas for the media. It not only had an opinion, it was the critical medium for influencing the choice to go to war.
But this has all happened before. In Vietnam, in the first Iraq War, in the Yugoslavs war. The Ukraine War. All of these were on TV (and now on computer monitors, smartphones, and tablets). And all of it will happen again.
The cameras and screen have become ever smaller as the world has grown ever larger. The current media products we use are different: X replaced the newspaper, Instagram replaced the camera, TikTok replaced the television, and the influencer replaced the news anchor.
Mediums of media have become ever quicker and more viral. Stimulatory experiences Freud, Hitler, and Charlie Chaplin could only dream of. The technology of media has become the medium of technology.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man as a critical analysis of the mediums of his time and predicted many of the mediums to come. McLuhan saw media not as some fad or trend but rather as “the final phase of the extensions 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 we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” (3-4).
With this squeezing of time the urgency to understand these extensions of man becomes ever more pertinent. In the past, time was a factor in between events–there was a cause and later we experienced the effect. This is no longer the case. All action and reaction, all cause and effect occur simultaneously. We think in cause and effect but live them simultaneously. In this hyperdigital age, we are technologically speaking the whole of mankind is incorporated into our being. Ours into theirs. The man of action is now the man of reaction.
Now bringing all “social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the” the Black experience, the teenager experience, the high school experience, the wartorn experience. They “can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media” (5). We have become part of their experience. We evolve towards a shared consciousness explored in Christianity, Buddhism, Gramsci, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Such stimulation birthed the Age of Anxiety. Now it is not the point of view that matters, but the commitment and participation in the medium. No TikTok? Luddite. No Instagram? Suspect. No LinkedIn? Potentially an enemy of the revolution. Thus participation in the medium forces a point of view. Such participation leads to the “aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology” (5).
Necessarily, every “culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally” (5). Harmony to homogeneity to hegemony. The revolutionary seeds of radical authentic expression are always contained within the medium of its time.
The keyless iPhone was a perversion of the BlackBerry yet the essence of the smartphone was in the screen not a physical keyboard.
The war on fossil fuels contains within it the necessary seeds of an energy revolution to ascend the Kardashev gradient.
The homogeneity within “diversity, equity, and inclusion” contains within it the seeds of revolution in which the human being rebels against the self-imposed determinism of homo sapiens and embraces the indeterminism of the universe.
Understanding Media contains the subtitle The Extensions of Man with the seeds of our evolution being within the literal grasp of our hands: the very technology we create.
This is the introductory post in a project which will extensively examine the zeitgeist of people, products, and politics through Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The brilliance in McLuhan is understanding the underlying pieces of human nature and how the technology we use becomes a medium to examine the world and the universe.
All page references to Understanding Media will utilize the 1994 MIT Press version of the text which can be purchased here:
Print
Kindle
The author may receive a commission for editions purchased at the embedded links.
Your support on this journey is most appreciated.