Alexis Rondeau

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

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Cover of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Kindle

Marshall McLuhan

99 highlights · 26 notes · last read August 2021

Highlights I wrote a note on are shown in full. The other 76 are scrambled: the words are the author's, so here you only see where in the book I underlined something.

“There is one additional factor that has helped control depressions, and that is a better understanding of their development.” Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.

Page 6

My note Understand How it starts is understanding how to mitigate it in the future

“Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.”

Page 7

My note The next generation needs to rebel by choosimg the exact opposite

The “square” person and situation are not “cool” because they manifest little of the habit of depth involvement of our faculties.

Page 7

My note Its bad if its shallow

Melody, the melos modos, “the road round,” is a continuous, connected, and repetitive structure that is not used in the “cool” art of the Orient. The art and poetry of Zen create involvement by means of the interval, not by the connection used in the visually organized Western world.

Page 7

My note Zen involves by interval while the melody of a story connects dots

Spectator becomes artist in oriental art because he must supply all the connections.

Page 7

My note Involvement to create connections

Slang offers an immediate index to changing perception. Slang is based not on theories but…

Page 7

My note Slang helps understand the difference of change

My note Its based on life not thought

The student of media will not only value slang as a guide to changing perception, but he will also study media as…

Page 7

My note Like the student of markets.

who is the student of media

any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive…

Page 7

My note Technology Creates environment

In his splendid work Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963), Eric Havelock contrasts the oral and written cultures of the Greeks. By Plato’s time the written word had created a new environment that had begun to detribalize man. Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all the contingencies of life — Ann Landers in verse. With the advent of individual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program for literate men. It was based on the Ideas. With the phonetic alphabet,…

Page 7

My note The impact of written word: two types of men. Written leads to detribalization

spoken had to be memorized by the tribe

My note Classified wisdom instead of tribalized wisdom

Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition,…

Page 7

My note Now were moving past classified wisdom towards pattern recognition - a whole new way of learning and a diffrent environment

It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a…

Page 7

My note Young minds think in circuits not classes

My note School is a place of classified information

The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed…

Page 7

My note How do things connect?

“The medium is the message” means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The “content” of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically…

Page 7

My note The electric environment has the industrial environment as content

When machine production was new, it gradually created an environment whose content was the old environment of agrarian life and the arts and crafts. This older environment was elevated…

Page 7

My note Machines were the environment that had agriculture as cotent

The machine turned Nature into an art form. For the first time men began to regard Nature as a source of…

Page 7

My note The new environment turns the old into art

Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form. When writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialogue into an art form. When printing was new the Middle Ages became an art form. “The Elizabethan world view” was a view of the Middle Ages. And the…

Page 7

My note Technology Turns the old technology into art

For, as Edward T. Hall has explained in The Silent Language, men are never aware of the ground rules of their…

Page 7

My note We live but dont understand the rules we live by

Media study at once opens the doors of perception.

Page 7

My note Understanding Media helps understand perception

We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction.

Page 7

My note Learning by discovery

The famous Hawthorne experiment, at the General Electric plant near Chicago, revealed a mysterious effect years ago. No matter how the conditions of the workers were altered, the workers did more and better work. Whether the heat and light and leisure were arranged adversely or pleasantly, the quantity and quality of output improved. The testers gloomily concluded that testing distorted the evidence. They missed the all-important fact that when the workers are permitted to join their energies to a process of learning and discovery, the increased efficiency is phenomenal.

Page 7

My note We strive to improve

Jean-Paul Sartre, as much as Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, has declared the futility of blueprints and classified data and “jobs” as a way out.

Page 7

My note Jobs are a very old concept

In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.

Page 7

My note Art as alarm instead of self expression

Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed.

Page 7

My note Automation removes jobs but creates ROLES of involvement