Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and Digital Culture Participants

I am reading McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man to hopefully understand more about different types of media. I'm told that this book has been discussed a lot through the years (despite being dated - it was published in 1964), and it proposes that media itself, not its content, should be the focus of study. Since we've been talking about curation and I've been looking into the idea of "the man behind the post," I'm hoping I'll get some more ideas and viewpoints from reading this.

Preview
No pictures in 396 pages of content (but at least I can turn to page 394...). Other than that quick observation, I think McLuhan's going to really focus on his idea that media is what changes society and not the content it produces/supplies. It's broken into Part I and Part II, with Part I introducing his ideas, but Part II focusing on different types of media and the power of the "written word." There's a lot of metaphors - something about a light bulb and "hot media" vs "cold media."


Early Social Proof
So I started talking to my friend who's a film major about the idea of "hot and cold media." McLuhan says that a movie is "hot media" because it is intensifying one instance and demands the viewer's attention for a fixed amount of time to tell you an idea. "Cold media" like a comic book requires more conscious participation with the reader because the reader has to take mostly pictures and find meaning/themes/etc on their own. Of course, my friend immediately said that movies have meaning if done correctly, and intelligent movie goers will search out that meaning just as they would search it in a book. I'm wondering if the same goes for digital culture since we talk all the time about finding scholarly or authoritative content in a mass collection of information. What are the hot and cold medias in the digital world specifically?

Similar Books
Looking at Google, Amazon, and Goodreads for books like McLuhan's, I found three books that took McLuhan's ideas that media should be analyzed over content and pushed even further. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte talks about the evolution of CD-Roms, multimedia, hypermedia, HDTV, graphics, etc and how it is shifting from information providers to pathways of piracy (similar to McLuhan's warning that text has power, Negroponte warns of the piracy to those words) This was in 1996, but even with Theodor Adorno's The Culture Industry and Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media published in early 2000s further still evaluates media as having social affects.

Adorno argues that digital media/the industry turns individuality into "banality" is a "mass culture." Everyone recognizes the influence of media and are losing their creativity to it. Manovich writes a systematic theory of new media and talks about how new media relies on older conventions of media. No matter what the argument is, all three of these authors are evaluating the media and how it in turn affects the content and culture, not how content affects culture.

Who Cares?
Apparently there is someone enthusiastic enough to have a Twitter account for Marshall McLuhan (who died in 1980) and posts tweets about his philosophies on media. I noticed also under the hashtag #mcluhan there were a lot of Spanish speaking people writing about him and his ideas on how "the medium is the message." Same on a tumblr search, lots of posts in Spanish and Italian. Don't know what that means other than his philosophies go beyond just his English publications apparently! Here is a visual I've seen circulated on one of McLuhan's main theories. There are blog posts (here and here) and even a question on ask.com wondering if twitter is an extension of himself or a media outlet. In the end, the people posting, blogging, and tweeting are all asking the same questions McLuhan did: how is the medium affecting society and culture? It isn't about the content necessarily. How does Twitter or Tumblr or Blogger or Google+ differ from one another and act as catalysts to how we are as people online and offline?

Formal Reviews
In the three reviews I read over from a Google review search, I found that all three praise McLuhan for his innovative understanding and critique of media. He was the pioneer of media theory. Though it is dated, McLuhan's points still apply now (especially his well known phrase "the medium is the message" and controversial idea that media kills written words). The reviews do generally agree the book is a difficult read because his "ideas are not as neatly presented...for McLuhan believes more in probing and exploring - 'making discoveries' -than in offering final definitions. For this reason, he will rarely defend any of his statements as absolute truths" (article here). So I'll be sure to take his theories in retrospect. However, the amount of influence McLuhan has had on current ideas of digital culture and technology (he interchanges media with technology and medium I've realized) means I really should be paying attention to how media applies to my topic of how people choose one media over another to create content.

Google Images Creative Commons

Informal Reviews
I think every review I read said it was a "frustrating read" and "dated." He makes "lots of intriguing ideas, but presented with vague language and very little supporting evidence" (review here). What I think I'll need to do when reading is just use his theories and then provide my own evidence to support or contradict his ideas since he (apparently) doesn't really explain himself with citations or facts. He uses metaphors like "the light bulb," explaining "a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social impact. A light bulb enables people to see in environments and spaces that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness" (review here). Interesting idea, but does content really have no affect on people? Media might have an affect in presenting ideas differently, but how can the content presented not change culture, digitally or not? And how do people decide which medium to use to be "hot or cold media?"

Courses
Wow. Lots of syllabi on Understanding Media. Media and technology classes at NYU, Drake, and MIT, a communications class at  UCSD, and even a history class at University of Tennessee all teach ideas from this book as an object of historical digital theory and understanding technology. I'd love to see how technology and media has evolved over the years but how it specifically changes all aspects of culture, from communicating to history to researching.

Multimedia
I linked an image earlier to a graphic for this book. So I looked up YouTube videos and found lots of interviews and even student made videos responding to McLuhan's ideas in Understanding Media. I liked the video below because not only did it mention the idea that media is an extension of who we are, but also has McLuhan explaining that men and women like living in the age just behind them because "change is terrifying." Other videos talked about without technology, we wouldn't know who we are anymore. Media literally is a part of who we are now. It's a pretty profound idea the more you think about it.

First Impressions of the Book (read here if you'd like)
Well his Part I is all about introducing his ideas that I've seen so much about: "the medium is the message." He gives a metaphor explaining that light is information that once put behind an ad or sign spells out a message. Think of a neon sign: without light, no sign to read. He also talks about the importance of the railway when it was first invented. It didn't give the idea of transportation, but it helped accelerate the process of moving from one side of a country to another. Then the airplane took over the train. It's the media that's important essentially.

I'm also learning more about what he means that media is an extension of man. He says "that the personal and social consequences of any medium- that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology" (pg 9). So the invention of the train or airplane or Facebook or Twitter are all extensions of ourselves because it affects us personally and socially.

My Thinking So Far
There are a lot of metaphors to follow. And I'm not sure they are enough to prove any of McLuhan's points. I'll have to keep reading, and hopefully I will understand his metaphors and ideas better as I start reading Part II of the book where he takes different media and directly talks about them. What do you guys think from what I've been able to throw up here in this blog post? Is the medium more important, or the content? Are you finding that technology is an extension of yourself that you wouldn't be able to live without? I'm thinking there's more credit in content than what McLuhan's says, but I do think it is important to look at the media we are using to create, consume, and curate content.