Understanding Media

Part I

Introduction

• 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. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media.
• We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
• Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement.
• In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the alood and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

1. Medium is the Message

• The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell our some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium.
• 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.
• It is in our IA testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.
• The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations, or patterns of perception steadily and without any 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.

2. Media Hot and Cold

• A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition". High definition is the state of being well filled with data
• A photograph is, visually, high def. A cartoon is low def simply because very little visual information is provided.
• Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
• Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio, has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
• Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
• Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.
• Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.
• The hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

Part II

8. The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil

9. The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear

10. Roads and Paper Routes

11. Number: Profile of the Crowd

12. Clothing: Our Extended Skin

13. Housing: New Look and New Outlook

14. Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card

15. Clocks: The Scent of Time

16. The Print: How to Dig It

17. Comics: Made Vestibule to TV

18. The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism

19. Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane

20. The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls

21. Press: Government by News Leak

22. Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride

23. Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses

24. Games: The Extensions of Man

25. Telegraph: The Social Hormone

26. The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim

27. The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinking Symbol

28. The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest

29. Movies: The Reel World

30. Radio: The Tribal Drum

31. Television: The Timid Giant

32. Weapons: War of the Icons

33. Automation: Learning a Living