Malcolm McLuhan has been on my radar for a long time, but I’d always been kinda avoiding him, the way I had previously avoided Joseph Campbell, and Jung, and Borges – at some level I was “saving them for later”, precisely because I felt like they seemed a lot like me, shared my interests, and I was afraid that if I read them too soon, I would be drawn into parroting their thoughts and opinions before having formulated my own… I know there’s some complexity there

Anyway, my friend Erica gifted me a copy of Understanding Media, published 1964, and I’ve been reading it. I’ve been enjoying it. I think I’m going to end up writing multiple essays about it. For starters, I’m going to make my own list of quotes that I found evocative and compelling.

• “During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned…. whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution (11)
• “Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the grammar of gunpowder”.” Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies.
• Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him.
• De Tocuqeville… explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteeneth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlied the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers. // In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold. The result was that the most important event in English history has never taken place; namely, the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution. The American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart from monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency has become very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could be.
• The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall: “Another damned fat book, eh Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?”
• A Passage to India by E M Forster is a dramatic study of the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational, visual, European pattern of experience.
• “Rational”, of course, has for the West long meant “uniform and continuous and sequential”. In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single Technology.
• The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise these wars within and without us.
• We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.
• Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man is the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J C Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (WHO, Geneva, 1953)
• Ancient prehistoric societies regard violent crime as pathetic. The killer is regarded as we do a cancer victim. “How terrible it must be to feel like that,” they say.
• If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demands of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice.
• The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them.
• The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions of concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.
• Money has reorganized the sense life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in society.
• Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today. On Feb 17, 1950 he said: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part of the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”
• Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind . Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As AJ Leibling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.

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• Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance: The rize of the waltz was a result of that longing for truth, simplicity, closeness to nature, and primitivism, which the last two-thirds of the eitghteenth century fulfilled.” In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergnce of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.”
• “The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monestaries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal empire over many lives. The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.”
• “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.”
• The role of women had also become fragmented with the advent of industrial specialism and the explosion of home functions into laundries, bakeries, and hospitals on the periphery of the community.
• The Freudian “censor” is less of a moral function than an indispensible condition of learning. Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The “censor” protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling of the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulance, particularly observable in periods of new technology.”
• via Robert Theobald: When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. (VV: Printer go brr)
• Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock. But poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered “from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw Newton and Locke and others as hynoqptized Narcissus types quite unable to meet the challenge of mechanism. WB Yeats gave the full Blakean version of Newton and Locke in a famous epigram: “Locke sank into a swoon; The garden died; God took the spinning jenny / Out of his side.”
• Blake’s counterstrategy for his age was to meet mechanism with organic myth. Today, deep in th lectric age, organic myth is itself a simple and automatic response capable of mathematical formulation and expression, without any of the imaginative perception of Blake about it.
• Scholars today are acutely aware of a discrepancy between their ways of treating subjects and the subject itself… The Hebrew and Eastern mode of thought tackles problem and resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a way typical of oral societies in general. The entire message is then traced and retraced, again and again on the rounds of a concentric spiral with seeming redundancy. One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to “dig” it.
• The concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media.
• Kenneth Boulding, The Image: The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image.
• The effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom. We have been through the three stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or stress of life, whether individual or collective.
• The “hard” sell and the “hot” line became mere comedy in the TV age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.
• Margaret Mead, Time Magazine (1954): There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together – and the people themselves must decide to move.
• “Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world.” 🤔

to be continued/

my interpretations:

literacy is detribalizing. “Specialist technologies detribalize. non-specialist electric technology retribalizes.”

it’s good to study ads, claiming that you pay no attention to them is a kind of midwit cope

mcluhan is trying to do a plato’s cave allegory for the 1960s

he talks a bunch about hot an cold media that I don’t entirely understand