Understanding Media (by Marshall McLuhan) Book Summary – Love Your Work, Episode
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You’ve heard the expression, “The medium is the message.” But what does that really mean? “The medium is the message” is a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in his book, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. More than fifty years after it was published – in – Understanding Media reads as if it’s from the future. In this Understanding Media summary, I’ll break down – in my own words – why “The medium is the message,” as well as other key ideas within this, one of the best media studies books.
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Three key ideas in Understanding Media
I’m going to cover three key ideas in this summary:
- The medium is the message. Basically, it’s not the content of the medium that matters. Instead, the characteristics of that medium determine its content.
- We’re shifting from mechanical technology to electric technology. Mechanical technology such as wheels, roads, and the printing press influence us in different ways from e
Understanding Media
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man () by media theorist and public intellectual Marshall McLuhan was a major work that helped inaugurate the field of New Media, which seeks to create ways of linking visual, aural, and functional design with other arts and sciences to reshape theory and public life. Much of McLuhan’s book is centered on his most famous assertion that “the medium is the message”; that is, the structure of the delivery system transmitting any given content is more important than the content itself. He exhorts other design theorists and public thinkers to focus on these transmission modes rather than what people might use them to say since the medium delimits a prioriwhat it is possible to say.
McLuhan splits the book into two main sections. The first explicates a distinction between what he calls “hot media” and “cold media.” Hot media represent extensions of our physical capacities, refining or enriching them with a high density of information. In this category, he includes images and text, since they are dense with visual data processed by the eyes. Moreover, they are relatively unambiguous from an objective point of view, since tBest summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
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Written by Shabufa Nasir Mim and other people who wish to remain anonymous
To begin Understanding Media, McLuhan introduces 'hot and cool media,' explaining that one medium interprets another medium in the content. This means that the content of media is the expression of another form of media.
He then turns to analyzing the forms of common media from the 's. Among his discussion are the following media: Spoken Word, Written Word, Roads and Paper Routes, Comics, Advertisements, Games, Television, and even Weapons, among many more. Essentially, the discussion is an explanation of the manner in which different media express content through form—they all have this in common.
He argues that each of these media have their own inherent meaning, expressed through form. For instance, he argues that the secret meaning of film is that a movie should express the mechanics of human life in a highly rapid manner. The message of print is authority, especially as he disc
Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by Timothy Sexton
In , Renaissance scholar and English Professor Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and created a revolution in the very foundation of critical theory that has since made it irrefutably one of the most influential works of literature of the 20th century. Long before there was such a thing as the internet, foundation of analyzing meaning was constructed upon the idea that content was king. In fact, content was not just king, it was everything. In Understanding Media, McLuhan sets for a sustained argument that the meaning of any content is only a contextual component of the medium through the content is delivered. From this proposition arises not just the most important phrase from the book, but one of the most important phrases of the latter 20th century.
“The medium is the message.”
In other words, one cannot fully understand the message without understanding media and its impact upon the senso
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