I found this book a lot more readable than The Gutenberg Galaxy. Gutenberg had way too many literary references, and this one had them too, but it was more of what I was looking for. That said, between these two books, I feel like I've read half of Finnegan's Wake.
McLuhan starts by telling us that "After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding." Electricity, writes McLuhan, has brought the world closer together than ever and will only continue to do so. The electric age's implosion is in conflict with the explosion and expansion of the mechanical age. But one of McLuhan's precepts is that technologies stack on top of each other, and don't really fully replace each other. So there isn't a complete implosion. Something interesting about McLuhan's perspective in 1964 and mine today is that he sees electricity as necessarily imploding the world and forcing us to all live in close proximity. However, today, the internet allows us to all ignore each other better, being siloed into political bubbles. I also find the idea that most previous inventions, like the wheel, were "explosive." McLuhan calls Roman roads explosive inventions, but Roman roads carried barbarians in just as well as they brought Romans out.
One principle that I didn't understand before or after reading the book was the idea of hot and cold media. I understand that hot media are supposed to engage one sense in high definition and require focus and cool media are more passive, but I don't really think these ideas match with the technologies he describes as being hot and cold. Radio is hot, but the telephone is cold. Movies are hot, but TV is cold. But today I can listen to the radio on my phone or watch a movie on my TV. So I don't really understand what these mean. Cool media, like oral speech, have more gaps to be filled in by the listener, while hot media fill everything in for the listener. Who knows why a film does that but a TV show doesn't. Hot forms allow less participation, and exclude, while cool media require more participation from the audience and includes. I don't know.
One important concept from the book, that is shared in The Gutenberg Galaxy, is that Western culture is built on the written word, and that the rise of electrical communication will threaten that by focusing more on oral communication. The ear is rising back up to challenge the eye. But McLuhan, who sees a possible panic about this, views the transition with optimism. He suggests that, if we see the American flag, we get a lot more symbolic value out of it than if we read the written words "American flag." The transition from that written word to more pictures in the form of TV and movies and sounds in the form of radio increases instances of seeing the genuine article, the flag, and not just reading the words. But I am not really convinced of any clear outcome from this like McLuhan is.
Something else that was interesting from the book was that in the age of the manuscript, authorship of a text was less important. People didn't "express themselves" in books as much as they wrote something that was more universal or copied it without attributing the text, sometimes adding their own flourishes. But with typography, when one could speak to the world rather than just whoever was literally holding or copying your book, people expressed themselves more. People could be more personal when they could write for a broad audience instead of just the individuals who could actually get a hold of their book and its few copies.
Here are two semi-predictions that McLuhan makes that I think are coming true. McLuhan writes that privacy is "unknown" in tribal societies, which would fit well the idea that electricity is making us a more tribal society, since we are definitely losing privacy. He also writes that alcohol is a social bond in an individualist and fragmented world, but is a destructive force in a close-knit tribal society. On the other hand, gambling is viewed more favorably in tribal societies than in individualist societies. Gambling is up among young people and drinking is down, so maybe that is some indication of America becoming a more tribal, less individualistic society.
Miscellaneous:
- This was interesting: after the rise of Islam, Romans were cut off from their papyrus supply in Egypt. Byzantium relied instead on parchment, but it was more expensive of a material. It was paper, brought all the way from China, that accelerated education and commerce and provided the basis for prints to set off the Renaissance.
- Until 1700, more than 50% of all printed books were either ancient or medieval.
- McLuhan writes that "In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices." Is this really different in other countries?
- Something interesting that McLuhan writes about politics is that the advantage of the legislative branch is its ability to dive into "unsavory subjects." While the executive has to project all the good things, the legislative can get into the bad stuff, which is more interesting to most people. It can use its investigative powers to outrage people.
- I loved this line on cars: "In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparable more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the internal-combustion engine."
- Once again, McLuhan's generalizations about nationalities are so ridiculous. He even says Germans don't count as Westerners in this book.
- "Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all." Very hot take. Crazy person talk.
- I'm pretty sure this book coined the term media fallout.
