Understanding media

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Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a book on media theory by Marshall McLuhan published in 1964 .

The book is the source of the phrase "The medium is the message". The work was one of the first of its kind to deal with the effects of globalization on local cultures. It exerted great influence on humanities scholars, writers and social theorists.

Summary

In the first part, McLuhan explains the differences between hot and cold media and the way in which one medium translates the content of another medium. McLuhan formed the summary The content of one medium is always another medium.

In the second part, McLuhan analyzes the media known in 1964, assessing the form of a medium as more important than its content. The analysis includes the spoken word, the written word (e.g. in a manuscript ), streets and the transport of printed messages, numbers , clothing , housing , money , clocks , printing (e.g. in lithography or woodcut ), Comics , the printed word (e.g. in typography ), telephone , sound recording , films , radio , television and automation .

McLuhan uses historical quotes and anecdotes to illustrate the ways in which new media are changing the perceptions of societies. McLuhan emphasizes the effects of each medium and puts their content in the background. He differentiates between hot and cold media. Hot media require a low degree of user participation, while cold media require intensive user participation. Accordingly, McLuhan defines radio as a hot medium, since listening does not require full user participation. Television is defined as a cold medium as it requires greater user involvement.

Media concept

McLuhan uses the interchangeable words medium , media and technology . According to McLuhan, a medium is every “extension of ourselves”, just like “every new technology”. In addition to forms such as newspapers, television and radio, McLuhan includes the light bulb , cars, speech and language in his definition of media, as all of these as technologies bring about communication and their forms or structures the way in which the world is perceived and understood will change.

McLuhan hypothesized that the conventional methods of studying the media would not be useful because they would only pay attention to the content, thus rendering them unable to perceive the psychological and social effects. With this method, the electric light is not perceived as a medium because it has no content. According to McLuhan, every medium strengthens or accelerates existing processes and causes a change in the scale, speed, form and pattern of human cooperation, relationships and actions, which leads to psychological and social consequences. McLuhan describes the effects of a medium on people as the medium's message.

To illustrate his thesis, McLuhan uses the example of mechanization to show that regardless of the product, the effect is the same. McLuhan criticized the conventional understanding of the media for describing the "scratching but not the itching". McLuhan saw David Sarnoff , then chairman of the RCA , as one of the media experts who followed the conventional understanding and whose explanations McLuhan described as the "voice of the current sleepwalking". Every “medium add to what we already are”, whereby it implements “expansions and reductions” of the human senses and bodies and technically reshapes them. McLuhan assumed that this would " narcissistically " hypnotize people and prevent them from seeing the real nature of the media.

McLuhan also assumed that the content of one medium was always a different medium.

The effects of each medium are limited by the existing social conditions, as it integrates with the existing and reinforces existing processes. The media also influence different societies in different ways.

According to McLuhan, the only way to perceive the real "principles of power" of a medium (or a structure) is to stand at a distance from it, to allow the medium's ability to put the ignorant into a subliminal narcissistic trance and to "make its own assumptions, Transferring prejudices and values ​​to him “to escape. The distant position makes it possible to control and predict the effects of a medium. McLuhan finds it extremely difficult to control and predict a medium, since "it can take effect on first contact, like the first notes of a melody". McLuhan cites Alexis de Tocqueville and typography as a historical example of such distancing . Tocqueville came into his position because he was a man of letters. As a historical example of the effects of a technological grip on society, McLuhan cites the Western world, which gave up its principles of "uniformity, continuity and sequentialism" in favor of the "rational".

McLuhan suggests that media are languages that have their own structures and grammatical systems and that they could be studied as such. He assumed that media had effects that influence the way in which individuals, societies and cultures perceive and understand the world. Based on his research in New Criticism , McLuhan argued that technology would relate to a culture like words would relate to a poem: the second derives its meaning from that formed by the first.

McLuhan's media theory was influenced by Harold Innis .

Examples of media and their message

Examples of media and their message
Explanations Essence (the real message) Content / use (the irrelevant message)
mechanization Supports people mechanically and physically. It arises from the " fragmentation of a process and the stringing together of each individual piece." The essence is the "technique of fragmentation". It changes human relationships “fragmentarily, centralistically and superficially”. A process is broken down into a sequence without causal principles. The product made (corn flakes or Cadillacs)
automation Using machines instead of people In essence it is "integral and decentralized" The product made (corn flakes or Cadillacs)
Movie The film accelerates the mechanical (a sequence of frames) Through the “pure acceleration of the mechanical” he carried us from the world of rows and connections into the world of creative aspects and structures. The message of the medium of film is that of the transition from linear connections to aspects.
electricity The electric age The enormous speed of electricity caused a synchronization . It ended the sequencing and concatenation that mechanization had done, causing the "causes of things to come back into consciousness." “The electrical speed took over the sequences of the mechanical film, after which the courses of power in the structures and media became louder and clearer. We are returning to the icon . "It embodies the change from the approach of concentrating on" specialized segments of attention (taking up a specific perspective) "to the idea of" comprehensive awareness "for the whole, the consideration of the" whole field ", a" Sense of the entire pattern ”. It made the sense of “the form and function as a unit as a whole”, an “integral idea of ​​structure and alignment” necessary and predominant. It influenced painting (especially cubism ), physics, poetry, communication, and educational theory .
Electric light "Extremely radical, ubiquitous and decentralized ... it eliminates the factors of space and time in human perception, just as radio, telegraph, telephone and television do, creating deep involvement." No.
(Although it can be used to spell "Any Brand Name")
electric power in industry Identical to the electric light (Different from electric light)
telegraph pressure
Printing and typography The new visual print culture The message is the principles of uniformity, continuity and linearity. McLuhan refers to the message as "their grammar". Despite its “cultural saturation”, in the 18th century the printed word was able to “homogenize the French nation, combining the complexities of ancient feudal society and oral society”; thereby promoting the French Revolution, which “was carried out by the new writers and lawyers has been". Limitation: The pressure could work in a society like that of Great Britain, where "the old oral traditions were at work", making the country's culture unpredictable and dynamic. While England was ruled by the medieval instrument of parliament, the printing culture in France and North America, which were more linear and had no comparable institutions with similarly far-reaching powers. The content of the print is the written word.
Write language
language It is a concrete thought process that is inherently non-verbal.
radio
watch TV It speaks and says nothing at the same time.
railroad "It accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human actions, creating entirely new types of cities, work and leisure." Freight ; "It works in a tropical and a northern environment."
plane "By accelerating the speed of transport, it tends to dissolve the railroad form of cities, politics and perception." What it is used for

Hot and cold medium

A hot medium is a medium that expands a single sense of McLuhan. It is characterized by a wealth of details and a large amount of information. The recipient only a small attention span is required. Therefore, media that are characterized by "low involvement" are hot media. McLuhan is one of the hot media. B. photography , cinema , radio , but also the phonetic alphabet or the book .

A cold medium is a medium which is characterized by a "high involvement" of the recipient for McLuhan. It demands active supplementation and completion by the recipient. Cold media include all communication media, e.g. B. the telephone, e-mail, Internet, etc. But cartoons, caricatures, comics , television and language are also cold media according to McLuhan.

The fundamental problem that arises when dealing with this construct is the fact that a medium is not inherently “cold” or “hot”, but that these are fundamentally relational terms. When McLuhan, who is famous for his cool prose and his cold approach to the hot medium of writing, writes that the medium of television, which at that time was not yet a high-resolution medium, was a cold medium, then this quality only results from a comparison with another medium or with a specific aspect of the medium being compared. In the case of television, its quality results in comparison to the likewise audiovisual medium of film, which, due to the photographic image sharpness, demands less from the recipient. McLuhan consistently writes as if the media-specific quality was a fixed, i.e. independent of the respective moment of comparison. Only relatively late in the essay does he explain this logic of comparison on which the terms are based. McLuhan's strategy of representation requires the reader to show a high level of initiative and / or subjective supplementation and is intended to get the serious reader to think about the structural properties of the media.

Marshall McLuhan borrowed the distinction between “hot” and “cold” from the popular musical styles of “ hot jazz ” and “ cool jazz ”.

See also

Other publications by McLuhan:

Book editions

literature

  • Stefan Hoffmann: Reread: "Marshall McLuhan's 'Understanding Media'" . In: Medienwissenschaft (2002) Issue 1, pp. 118–121.

Web links

English-language web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f p.7
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m pp. 8-9
  3. ↑ p.10
  4. ↑ a b c p.11
  5. ↑ p.8
  6. ↑ a b c d p.15
  7. ↑ Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan ( Memento of October 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), a virtual museum exhibition at Library and Archives Canada
  8. ↑ a b c p. 12
  9. ↑ p. 13
  10. ↑ p.14
  11. ↑ Alexis de Tocqueville : The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856)
  12. ↑ quoted from Romeo and Juliet