Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

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

Cool forms of media, on the contrary, require a good deal of audience participation. They generally give less information than hot forms of media, so it requires the audience to do what McLuhan calls filling in the gaps of the story. Examples of this could be something like a Skype or Zoom video discussion group where people can ask questions, stor... 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.

Point is, in the beginning, human beings didn’t have any technology. They had their senses, their brains, and the best ideas they could come up with on their own. But the instant that some creative human being came up with the idea of a hammer and realized it was far more effective at breaking up rocks than slamming your forehead into them, life in... See more

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.

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.

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

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.