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clarkminimized's review against another edition
3.0
McLuhan does not cite any of his sources, so when I read this I was equally skeptical and enthralled. Great way to rethink how we live our lives is changed be each new medium we create, from the wheel to the lightbulb to the internet.
math_foo's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
2.0
I can't believe this got taken seriously at the time. There are some interesting ideas; but it is mostly a serious of unsupported metaphors and ignorance about how... just about everything works? It took me to near the end to work out that TV is a 'cold' medium while movies are 'hot' because... TV is blurrier than movies.
wrackspurtt's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
1.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism and Sexism
kattas's review against another edition
5.0
Swerving wildly between western elitism, paternalism, and prescient visions of the future, about a third of what McLuhan says is complete racist gibberish, another third is interesting social commentary, and the final third is pure brilliance. What makes this book worth reading still is his exploration and explanation of social phenomena that have only taken place fifty years after the initial publication of this text. There are passages that seem to perfectly describe the history of social and technological evolution from the 90s through and into the new millennium as technologies like social media bring to pass predictions - or more accurately descriptions of processes - from 1964.
fletcher_smith's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.5
Most of what’s valuable in this book was already familiar to me from the glosses in various social science classes. The book itself is not very good, and the 2.5 stars are for the high-level conceptual contributions made. In some ways, I’m sure this is unfair - the highlights were already familiar to me having been absorbed into our culture and lexicon, but that only shows their value. And were the book slimmer, more concise, or just better at articulating those points, I’d probably have appreciated it more.
But it’s none of those things. It’s large and shaggy and poorly argued (or, more accurately, not argued at all). It has numerous, long digressions discussing the differences in cultures/peoples (like “Africans” and “Europeans” - yes, entire continents) that are frankly embarrassing and cringe-inducing. Few of his assertions are supported, almost none are well-supported. They are allusive - literary tropes as the intro suggests - not real arguments. And that’s exactly the problem. Over and over I found myself cocking an eyebrow, doubtfully considering some odd assertion or another (and there are many).
So what of the high-level conceptual points? The idea of looking at the structure of a medium itself as separate from the content is undoubtedly useful and subtle. Neil Postman picks up this thread for TV in the 80s in a much more accessible, lucid way. And just today I ready a piece by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books (“The Dream of the Raised Arm”) that purported to examine the algorithm as a medium, even using McLuhan-esque language to do it. This is all good and true even if McLuhan isn’t the best explicator of his idea.
But in the actual text, a lot of the conceptual stuff becomes opaque or silly when actually applied. Take the stuff on the Kennedy/Nixon debate. McLuhan trumpets his prediction that Nixon would fail to win the debate because he doesn’t fit well on TV - Nixon has a “sharp intense image” while Kennedy has a “blurry, shaggy texture” (329). It took me a while to realize that a lot of this analysis seems to be a combination of common baseless punditry and the literal blurriness of mid-60s TV. In what way, exactly, is Kennedy blurry? Are we sure he isn’t just bluff, charming, and good-looking in a way that plays well on TV because people like to see good looking people on TV (he earlier asserts that good looking people are ripe for TV but I don’t think that has held up well, low-def or not).
Similarly, the classification of media into hot/cold seems rather ad hoc. TV is a cool medium because it demands participation, seemingly because it has so little information (low def image). Radio is hot. One could extrapolate and devise reasons to believe these things, but it’s not clear how useful the concept really is (or how hard it would be to argue that the classification is the opposite) because there’s so little there there. It leads to wild assertions like that no one would want to watch TV alone and that baseball is doomed.
On page 305, he says that the content of every medium is another medium. It was at that point that I thought to myself, what the hell are we talking about here. What’s the point of the content/medium distinction if it all collapses into the same thing. But by then I was almost done, so I shrugged and let it all go.
kinetica's review against another edition
3.0
I only read 1/3 of this book but I'm marking it as READ anyway because of all the time I spent on it! I wanted to read "The Medium Is the Message" and kept going--reading with someone helped a lot. ,We talked at least an hour or two for every chapter reading 11 chapters in total. His writing is annoying. frustrating? He uses so many metaphors, seems about to set something up and then not finish it or moves in to another idea... I'm not finding it useful to keep reading at this point. It was interesting to think about alongside other essays on media that I read recently. Questions about how we see the world and how that vision is shaped by the media we consume, how technology changes what we think is possible still feel relevant.
cultural_detritus's review against another edition
4.0
Although some aspects of this book are overrated, and others are just plane wrong, the prophetic quality of McLuhan's writing is astonishing.
zeh's review against another edition
4.0
Hard to read, yet visionary and enlightening.
Gosh, how do I even begin talking about this one. It took me almost 4 years to finish it; I had to take breaks from our from time to time. It's one of those books that seem to be written for a different kind of focus, and so densely packed with information and connections that you start feeling overwhelmed in no time.
He has a way to just dump information. In the same sentence he links Einstein's Theory of Relativity to MAD Magazine ("relative" understanding opened the door to cartoons and MAD's cynicism); in another wheels and Krazy Kat (wheels extend men's reach; bricks extend Krazy Kat's).
Still, he has a way to see and explain patterns others have ignored; it's no surprise many of the lessons from this book are still repeated to this day, and many future predictions turned out to be accurate (if painfully described).
Reads like the extensive ramblings of a madman that was correct more often than not.
Gosh, how do I even begin talking about this one. It took me almost 4 years to finish it; I had to take breaks from our from time to time. It's one of those books that seem to be written for a different kind of focus, and so densely packed with information and connections that you start feeling overwhelmed in no time.
He has a way to just dump information. In the same sentence he links Einstein's Theory of Relativity to MAD Magazine ("relative" understanding opened the door to cartoons and MAD's cynicism); in another wheels and Krazy Kat (wheels extend men's reach; bricks extend Krazy Kat's).
Still, he has a way to see and explain patterns others have ignored; it's no surprise many of the lessons from this book are still repeated to this day, and many future predictions turned out to be accurate (if painfully described).
Reads like the extensive ramblings of a madman that was correct more often than not.