Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

At 16 (1977) I discovered the original paperback Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and it changed my world and the way I perceive every aspect of modern culture and technology forever. Throughout college, graduate school and a life of writing I have consistently supported my arguments and theories with ideas and quotes found within these pages. Fortunately I have not been alone, as entire branches of scientific inquiry, schools of academic thought, business models and technological breakthroughs can credit his lucid, vivid and coherent frameworks for their existence.

As an educator I endeavor to impart McLuhan's insights so that students might begin to see how profoundly every new technology changes their world.

This beautiful hardcover now sits at my side and includes historic details of McLuhan, the manuscript and its reception as well as valuable critical insights of W. Terence Gordon, an expert uniquely qualified to organize this edition.

This is one of the rare works which seem to explain new realities in a way which no one else before has grasped. It is the kind of work that gives a ' whole new picture of what is happening'. And if for this alone this work would be of great value.
I am by no means a media expert and cannot really comment on many of the claims of the work .
Its virtues are in calling attention to the new media( mainly television) and understanding how it changed our perception of the world, and of ourselves.
The basic MacLuhan distinction between hot and cold media between those which give us a lot of information and those which require our own greater participation in creating the reality , seems to me sensible to a degree. But where MacLuhan lost me was in his celebration of the present reality, the new culture.
I for one have the old- fashioned sense of the superiority of the reading world to the television world- the superiority of the kind of minds it produces.
I too think MacLuhan was over- optimistic in seeing the ' global village' as a kind of positive development for mankind. The fact is our world today is tremendously complex politically, fragmented in not necessarily wonderful ways.
It is possible to argue that this work ' foresaw ' the Internet, but even if this were the case it seems to me that we still have to consider the overall question of the meaning, value and virtue of the Internet.
Mankind's situation I want to suggest is much much more complex than ' the media is the message' in the ' global village' suggests.
I do not again think I have even begun to do justice to the richness and variety of MacLuhan's insights.
I just here would like to register the view that I do not believe that he really has given us ' the key' to understanding our world. I would even go farther and say however rich the understanding he provides about the media, and their relation to each other- he too is far from the last word in this. The questions now raised by the Internet world I think are in many ways outside those he considered.
Like all important thinkers he too is limited by the Time which has come after, bringing developments and problems he could not be expected to foresee.