understanding media the extensions of man

He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent? Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.McLuhan, Marshall.

In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

In effect, media now begs to be redefined. There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. Terms and phrases such as 'the global village' and 'the medium is the message' are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate. This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media.

Understanding media the extensions of man