Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

The Gutenberg way of perceiving is an over-indexed, over-developed tendency towards the visual, the structured, the linear. He says at one point, this may actually be part of the reason historically we’ve had such a narrow, linear view of things like time or history or identity. I mean, you ask people that question: what would you rather be, blind ... See more

Media and technology are always extensions of ourselves out there into the physical world. And the media and technology at our disposal has a drastic impact on not only what we think of as being a human being but also on our very perceptions, on what we perceive at all.

But McLuhan would say, try not to only think about the fact that we make the tools. Think about how much the tools make us as well.

McLuhan once said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive environment, a pervasive medium is always beyond perception.” The big point to McLuhan is this: the messages that these media of written language are sending to us go far beyond the actual content or subject matter of the thing that’s being written abo... See more

What I mean is, long ago, for who knows how many thousands of years, the primary means of communication or media was talking about things. We lived in villages or tribes. If somebody had an idea, they didn’t write a book about it; they spoke about it. If somebody wanted wisdom from the past, they didn’t go to the library; they asked someone more ex... See more

Hot forms of media, McLuhan says, are generally low in audience participation. They provide people with a lot of information and data. He describes them as mechanical and uniform. It’s very one-way. One party is giving the information; the audience is receiving the information. And that’s pretty much it. Examples of this would be things like books,... See more

Telescopes are an extension of your ability to see; they’re an extension of your eyes. Hearing aids are an extension of your ability to hear. TVs are extensions of your eyes and ears; you can see and hear things going on on the other side of the globe that you never would have otherwise seen.

Once that hammer is introduced, once the telescope is introduced or the computer—how about a brand-new type of nuclear weapon—some piece of what it is to be a human being changes in that moment.

any new technology that’s invented or any new idea that we come up with is ultimately an extension of ourselves, an extension of our physical bodies, an extension of our consciousness. It is us extending something about ourselves further out there into the world.