McLuhon=Crazy?

Confusion is the only word that comes to mind when I think about the pieces we read and discussed by Marshall McLuhon. While I was reading “The Medium is the Message” and “Media Hot and Cold,” I had a very difficult time understanding if McLuhon supported the new forms of media that were making on impact on society, or if he felt they were damaging. In class we discussed how McLuhon embraced new media and believed that it would unify society and encourage participation, while print literacy supports fragmentation. In the first chapter he seems to praise the movie, or the medium it represents, by saying that it “carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure” and encourages “involvement.” (McLuhon 27-28). This information seems to support the fact that McLuhon was a proponent of new media. However, McLuhon suggests in the same article that we are “numb in our new electric world” (McLuhon 31). In the next chapter “Media Hot and Cold,” McLuhon calls the movie a “hot” medium, which he says is one that involves little participation, which is a complete contradiction to what he said before.

McLuhon also states that we are in a “TV age of cool” that has “turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself” (McLuhon 36, 40). If McLuhon supports new media and feels that is will unify society, why does he feel that movies do not support participation and that television is damaging society? Why does he group television in a different category of media than movies? Perhaps television was different at the time that McLuhon was published, but now I feel like television is very similar to movies, especially with dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “24.”

Usually class discussions help to clarify a confusing reading, but I left Tuesday’s class in bewilderment and questioning McLuhon’s sanity when he wrote “Understanding Media.”