In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan described and explained media and cultural transformations. This paper will analyze the first seven chapters of his seminal book, which contain his central ideas on mass communication and contemporary culture.
McLuhan offers a form of technological determinism as he sees a relationship between the way we live and the way we process information. Cultural change is driven by technological change, says McLuhan, and for McLuhan it is specifically changes in modes of communication that shape human existence. McLuhan saw every new communications development as an extension of some human faculty -- the book is an extension of the eye, the wheel an extension of the foot, clothing an extension of the skin, and so on. Media is defined broadly by McLuhan to be anything that amplifies or intensifies a human faculty and that extends our reach and increases our efficiency.
McLuhan's conception is expressed in the seemingly simple statement, "The medium is the message." He offered different views of what this meant, but it basically relates to the idea of persuasion in that he believed that the medium itself changes people more than the sum of the messages of the medium. How we communicate is as important as what we communicate, if not more important. McLuhan relates the different modes of communication to different human epochs, and the most effective means of persuasion shifts in each epoch according to the prevailing technology. What McLuhan means by this simple statement is that with the new technological media, the medium and the message are one so that the very existence of the medium shapes society and determines what we can and cannot do (or believe we can and cannot do).
In this chapter, McLuhan differentiates media as hot and cool media. A hot medium extends a single sense in "high definition," or the state or being filled up with data. Cool media include the carton, the tel...