Understanding Media

This was a frustrating read. Lots of intriguing ideas, but presented with vague language and very little supporting evidence. Sometimes while reading it I was unsure if I was reading the profound thoughts of a genius that was above my comprehension, the ramblings of a mad man, or just the drivel of a hack who thought he was a lot more clever than he actually was.

The scholarship in this book is embarrassingly sloppy. At times he makes big claims with absolutely no evidence to support them. When he does offer evidence it is often anecdotal, with no reference to anything concrete. He'll write something like "a study was conducted in Canada a few years back in which X happened," and then use that as solid proof that X is universal. Come one show more man! Where's the citation? You expect me to believe the outrageous claims you're making with no proof? I felt like I was reading cult literature at times. What's more, some of his claims, without a good understanding of the context, can be taken as quite racist.

I read one defense of his lack of evidence which argued that he came from the humanist tradition (he was an English professor) which does not rely on the scientific methods of hypothesis and experimentation, etc. That's a terrible excuse. If you're going to start spouting off about cognitive science and social psychology you better bring some hard evidence to support your claims or no one will take you seriously.

I really want to give this book a higher rating, because some of his ideas are very interesting and sound plausible and I do think I have learned to look at media and world history in a new way. But I could not in good faith recommend this book to a friend unless they were hardcore about media studies. I could possibly forgive the lack of evidence and recommend it to someone with a caveat regarding such, but his terrible prose is perhaps an even bigger hurdle to get over than his credibility. He presents his ideas in metaphors, but, because of the nature of his topics, sometimes it's difficult to be sure if he is being literal or metaphorical. This may be cute to some, but it is embarrassingly bad for a scientific text. Furthermore, many of his theories are contradictory, which makes it even more difficult to understand or take seriously.

I wish someone would go through this book, pluck the interesting and plausible ideas from it and present them in a clear way that exposes the contradictions and areas that require more research for support, because there is a lot of good food for thought in the pages of this book. Unfortunately, I don't think those morsels are worth the effort of reading this book. show less

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 show more 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. show less

This was partially a frustrating read. Lots of ideas, but vague language and little supporting evidence. The scholarship is sloppy. This is a good, not great summary of analytical claims by the media-studies pioneer. Not hard to read, but not so much visionary or enlightening. He has a way to just dump information. In the same sentence he links Einstein's Theory of Relativity to MAD Magazine ; in another sentence wheels and Krazy Kat (wheels extend men's reach; bricks extend Krazy Kat's). Reads like the extensive ramblings of a madman that was correct more often than not.

Dr. McLuhan gave us a group of insights into the transition from getting our information primarily from the print mediums to the screen exposed information bath of today. The epigrams are on the money, and so is the overall message. How we get our information has a serious effect on the way our brains process and retain the information. Into the bargain the medium necessarily transforms the information it tries to transmit. This book is still worth reading, and paying attention to the point of view, as well as the portrait of the pre-internet age , will be helpful for the ages to come.

Yes Marshall, we are entering a new tribalism, of course we are, where "hot" media that allow of less participation because they make more of the connections for you are being supplanted by "cool" media that allow of more engagement/immersion. Are these the most useful possible terms? Especially when you find that print is "hot" and TV is "cool", but movies are "hot", along with radio and photographs, and in contrast to cool comics. The internet? Unanticipated. And what does it mean that the less engaging media are the ones that, we are to understand, allow for more interpretative space? How is that hot?


There is scads to discuss here but half of it is just disagreeing with his terminology and the other half is trying to bend it till it show more works. But that doesn't matter, because in the future we'll all have personal robots beaming up cool images that will obviate the individual mind in some unspecified way, and we'll all work together and be like the "savages" again. Or at least, we'll all have tenure.


I feel like this review had potential, much like McLuhan's book, but started too illconceived and got too tangled to be worth sorting out--also, all too often, much like McLuhan's book. show less

McLuhan raises a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship of media to culture, but is frustratingly haphazard about following through on any of them. I can deal with him making oracular pronouncements with zero evidence to back them up, but it would be nice if he at least carried his ideas a little further, examined culture a little more closely... But I don't know, maybe it's not fair to blame a man for not being Foucault.

(Sep 2006) I was led to look up McLuhan through a number of online sources and reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he credits McLuhan as a major influence.

Reading Understanding Media is drinking from the firehose. McLuhan bursts with ideas, essentially reinterpreting human history through the lens of communication technology and its broader influence on culture. He famously says, "The medium is the message," i.e. content has less impact than form.

I would very much like to find more recent research that takes up McLuhan's program and attempts to sort the wheat from the chaff. McLuhan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, of which there is little in this volume. The modern field of media studies show more seems to have veered in a different direction... but perhaps I haven't found the right books yet. show less