A review by fletcher_smith
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan

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.