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Book Review: Understanding Media

April 10, 1993 on 3:33 pm | In Books | Add a Comment

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. Read April 1993.

Also trying to plow through Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 screed Understanding Media. It’s a chore. He tosses out some bright, shiny ideas but develops few of them. And the style is annoying at best. McLuhan writes in a shorthand associative manner that might be described as academic-on-a-rip. He throws references, sub-references and tangential examples into the pot with no apparent regard for how they might fit together or advance his argument.

McLuhan, a professor of lit at the U. of Toronto c. 1967, is widely read without being well read. Or, he is affecting the antiacademic pose of an autodidact with a fondness for the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake (anybody care to guess what the topic of Prof. McLuhan’s doctorate was?). Or, maybe, his predilection for omnivorous reference is a calculated way to mimic the information onslaught that is his subject. Certainly, McLuhan’s rapid-fire associative style is an almost perfect analog for flipping around the TV dial.

Still, his ideas and phrases have gained a surprising currency in the language. That’s how I came to pick up this book: I made a reference to the Global Village in my never-ending essay and stopped to ask myself if I really understood what was meant by the phrase. A few days later, I saw McLuhan’s book on the library sale table–for 25¢, who could refuse?

The Global Village, it turns out, is M’s utopic vision of what will happen when all of mankind sees that other men are just like him through the medium of television. “In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin,” McLuhan declaims. He contrasts the all-encompassing, all-involving electric media with the linear divisiveness of print. Print, he declares at one point, led to the rise of nationalism. Whereas TV’s total immersion will lead to a postliterate society where humans of earth all feel a part of the same tribe. It’s a lovely idea, but one that has not come to pass.

Why not? First, I suppose that the same forces that controlled print — law as manipulated by capital, and market forces — also control TV. Secondly, I think man’s sense of group identity is rooted in something more concrete than sound and image, it is attached to land and language. Presumably the Serbs and the Croats who have returned to slaughtering one another have equal access to MTV. They may share the same favorite videos, come away humming the same tunes, yet they pick up arms every day to voice a blood hatred that goes back centuries, to land and language. Why, exactly, McLuhan’s vision has failed is the topic of another essay.

I gave this treatise much too much time. It was, after all, an op-ed piece that was inflated into a book. That’s unfortunate, because Mr. McLuhan had just enough sound ideas to make a good essay. The padding here is gratuitous.

McLuhan includes incoherent chapters on Housing, Money, Clocks, Motorcars, Ads, Games, Telegraph, Phonograph, etc. Each of these chapters contains only the kernel of an idea that could have been given adequate play in a single paragraph.

His best chapter was on Television. McLuhan may have been the first to really show the perceptual differences between pre- and post-TV generations. “It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. … The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”

Earlier in the book, McLuhan discussed the Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960 and how radio listeners thought Nixon had won decisively, while TV viewers thought Kennedy was the victor. McLuhan closed his chapter on TV with Kennedy’s assassination. The televised funeral “revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the audience in a complex process.”

“Most of all, the Kennedy event provides an opportunity for noting a paradoxical feature of the “cool” TV medium. It involves us in moving depth, but it does not excite, agitate or arouse. Presumably this is a feature of all depth experience.” Actually, the most basic depth experiences, i.e., in real life are very moving. It’s only when TV is accepted as a surrogate for primary experience that our passions fail to engage. So it’s not surprising that the post-TV generations are without passion.