Notes on Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Summary

“The medium is the message” doesn’t mean what people think! It’s not about content (“the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”), it’s about the raw psychological states brought about by a new technology (8). McLuhan’s alarmism results from a misunderstanding of technology (“the electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology”) that he sees as gigantically problematic (17). Citing A Passage To India, he argues that encounters between linear, print culture and distributed electric cultures can yield to dissolution and an unarticulated sense of crisis.

Thoughts

McLuhan’s understanding of messages and media has to be connected to Guattari’s theories of subjectivation in Chaosmosis. Additionally, his theory of media change (see the quote about airplane wings below) suggests the reason for both ancient Greek rhetoric and the linguistic turn in post-structural thought.

Quotes

• “Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance” (12).
• “The ‘content’ of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech” (19).