Editing Marshall McLuhan (section)

== Major works ==
During his years at Saint Louis University (1937–1944), McLuhan worked concurrently on two projects: his doctoral [[doctoral thesis|dissertation]] and the manuscript that was eventually published in 1951 as a book, titled ''[[The Mechanical Bride|The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man]]'', which included only a representative selection of the materials that McLuhan had prepared for it.

McLuhan's 1942 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation surveys the history of the verbal arts ([[grammar]], [[logic]], and [[rhetoric]]—collectively known as the [[trivium]]) from the time of [[Cicero]] down to the time of Thomas Nashe.{{efn|McLuhan's doctoral dissertation from 1942 was published by [[Gingko Press]] in March 2006. Gingko Press also plans to publish the complete manuscript of items and essays that McLuhan prepared, only a selection of which were published in his book. With the publication of these two books a more complete picture of McLuhan's arguments and aims is likely to emerge.}} In his later publications, McLuhan at times uses the Latin concept of the ''trivium'' to outline an orderly and systematic picture of certain periods in the history of [[Western culture]]. McLuhan suggests that the [[Late Middle Ages]], for instance, were characterized by the heavy emphasis on the formal study of logic. The key development that led to the [[Renaissance]] was not the rediscovery of ancient texts, but a shift in emphasis from the formal study of logic to rhetoric and grammar. [[Modernity|Modern life]] is characterized by the re-emergence of grammar as its most salient feature—a trend McLuhan felt was exemplified by the [[New Criticism]] of Richards and Leavis.{{efn|For a nuanced account of McLuhan's thought regarding Richards and Leavis, see {{harvnb|M. McLuhan|1944}}.}}

McLuhan also began the [[academic journal]] ''Explorations'' with [[anthropologist]] [[Edmund Snow Carpenter|Edmund "Ted" Carpenter]]. In a letter to Walter Ong, dated 31 May 1953, McLuhan reports that he had received a two-year [[Grant (money)|grant]] of $43,000 from the Ford Foundation to carry out a communication project at the University of Toronto involving faculty from different disciplines, which led to the creation of the journal.<ref>{{cite news | last=Plummer | first=Kevin | date=May 3, 2014 | title=Historicist: ''Explorations'' at the Vanguard of Communications Studies | work=[[Torontoist]] | url=http://torontoist.com/2014/05/historicist-explorations-at-the-vanguard-of-communications-studies/ | access-date=August 3, 2017 | archive-date=June 30, 2017 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170630220435/http://torontoist.com/2014/05/historicist-explorations-at-the-vanguard-of-communications-studies/ | url-status=live }}</ref>

At a Fordham lecture in 1999, [[Tom Wolfe]] suggested that a major under-acknowledged influence on McLuhan's work is the [[Jesuit]] philosopher [[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin]], whose ideas anticipated those of McLuhan, especially the evolution of the human mind into the "[[noosphere]]."<ref name="TWolfe">{{cite web|last=Wolfe|first=Tom|date=December 2015|title=Tom Wolfe on Media, Advertising, Technology (1999)|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzBPmRPa7ls| archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211107/VzBPmRPa7ls| archive-date=2021-11-07 | url-status=live|access-date=23 April 2017|publisher=C-SPAN|quote=45m}}{{cbignore}}</ref> In fact, McLuhan warns against outright dismissing or whole-heartedly accepting de Chardin's observations early on in his second published book ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'':

{{blockquote|This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence.{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|p=32}}|author=|title=|source=}}

In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: "I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies." Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: "The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction&nbsp;... is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word 'evolution'.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community."{{sfn|Chrystall|2007|p=468}}

Some of McLuhan's main ideas were influenced or prefigured by anthropologists like [[Edward Sapir]] and [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], arguably with a more complex historical and psychological analysis.<ref name="Wyatt1971">{{cite journal |last1=Wyatt |first1=David |title=Hot and Cool in Anthropology: McLuhan and the Structuralists |journal=The Journal of Popular Culture |date=December 1971 |volume=5 |issue=3 |pages=551–561 |doi=10.1111/j.0022-3840.1971.0503_551.x }}</ref> The idea of the retribalization of Western society by the far-reaching techniques of communication, the view on the function of the artist in society, and the characterization of means of transportation, like the railroad and the airplane, as means of communication, are prefigured in Sapir's 1933 article on ''Communication'' in the [[Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences]],<ref>[[Edward Sapir]] (1933) ''[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460517/page/n805/mode/2up Communication]'', in [[Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences]] ( Johnson, Alvin Ed.) Vol. 4 pp.78-80</ref> while the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media draws from Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies.<ref name="LS1962">Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) ''[[The Savage Mind]]'', ch.8</ref><ref name="Taunton2019p223">Taunton, Matthew (2019) ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=aTGPDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA223 Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture]'', p.223</ref>

=== ''The Mechanical Bride'' (1951) ===
{{Main|The Mechanical Bride}}
{{more citations needed section|date=January 2018}}
McLuhan's first book, ''[[The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man]]'' (1951), is a pioneering study in the field now known as popular culture. In the book, McLuhan turns his attention to analysing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both [[dialectic]] and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at [[persuasion]]. At this point, his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of [[mass media|communication media]] independent of their content. His famous [[aphorism]] "[[the medium is the message]]" (elaborated in his ''[[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]]'', 1964) calls attention to this intrinsic effect of communications media.{{efn|The phrase "the medium is the message" may be better understood in light of [[Bernard Lonergan]]'s further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of [[consciousness]], the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan's terminology from ''Insight: A Study of Human Understanding'' to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message"; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found "much sense" in it—in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, [[Walter J. Ong]], McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's ''Insight''".{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1987|p=251}} Lonergan's ''Insight'' is an extended guide to "making the inward turn": attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully.  When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in [[percept]]s than [[concept]]s, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by [[George Herbert Mead]], [[Erving Goffman]], [[Peter L. Berger|Berger]] and [[Thomas Luckmann|Luckmann]], [[Kenneth Burke]], Hugh Duncan, and others.}}

His interest in the critical study of popular culture was influenced by the 1933 book ''Culture and Environment'' by [[F. R. Leavis]] and [[Denis Thompson|Denys Thompson]], and the title ''The Mechanical Bride'' is derived from a piece by the [[Dada]]ist artist [[Marcel Duchamp]].

''The Mechanical Bride'' is composed of 59 short essays<ref>{{Cite web |last=Marcus |first=Greil |date=2012-09-01 |title=TWENTIETH-CENTURY VOX: MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND THE MECHANICAL BRIDE |url=https://www.artforum.com/features/twentieth-century-vox-marshall-mcluhan-and-the-mechanical-bride-200824/ |access-date=2024-04-11 |website=Artforum |language=en-US}}</ref> that may be read in any order—what he styled the "[[mosaic]] approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article, or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on [[Aesthetics|aesthetic]] considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose these ads and articles not only to draw attention to their [[Symbolic communication|symbolism]], as well as their implications for the [[Corporation|corporate entities]] who created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. Roland Barthes's essays 1957 ''[[Mythologies]]'', echoes McLuhan's ''Mechanical Bride'', as a series of exhibits of popular mass culture (like advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs) that are analyzed in a [[semiology|semiological]] way.<ref>Gary Genosko (2002) [https://books.google.com/books?id=LquEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA24 McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion], p.24</ref><ref>Curtis, J. M. (1972). ''[https://www.jstor.org/stable/302057 Marshall McLuhan and French Structuralism] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210425084628/https://www.jstor.org/stable/302057 |date=2021-04-25 }}''. Boundary 2, 134-146.</ref>

=== ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' (1962) ===
{{Main|The Gutenberg Galaxy}}
Written in 1961 and first published by [[University of Toronto Press]], ''[[The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man]]'' (1962) is a pioneering study in the fields of [[orality|oral culture]], [[print culture]], [[cultural studies]], [[media ecology]] or [[media-adequacy]].<ref>Giessen, H W (1995), „Remarks to Marshall McLuhan“. In: Communications. The European Journal of Communication. Vol. 20, No. 1, (April) 1995, 129–135.</ref><ref>Giessen, H W (2015). "Media-Based Learning Methodology: Stories, Games, and Emotions". In Ally, Mohamed; Khan, Badrul H. (eds.). International Handbook of E-Learning Volume 2: Implementation and Case Studies. Routledge, 43-54.</ref>

Throughout the book, McLuhan makes efforts to reveal how [[communication technology]] (i.e., [[alphabetic writing]], the [[printing press]], and the [[electronic media]]) affects [[cognitive]] organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|p=41}}
<blockquote>[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.</blockquote>

==== Movable type ====
McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic, [[Tribe|tribal]] humankind to the [[Electronics|electronic age]]. According to McLuhan, the invention of [[movable type]] greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means [[phonemic orthography]]. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from [[logographic]] or logogramic writing systems, such as [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]] or [[ideograms]].)

Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the [[Gutenberg press]] was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from [[William Ivins]]' ''Prints and Visual Communication'', McLuhan remarks:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|pp=124–126}}
<blockquote>In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.…<p>The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.</p></blockquote>

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in ''[[The Medium Is the Massage]]'') <!-- BOOK TITLE IS MASSAGE NOT MESSAGE DO NOT CHANGE -->is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects [[social organization]]: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual [[Homogeneity and heterogeneity|homogenizing]] of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: [[individualism]], democracy, [[Protestantism]], [[capitalism]], and [[nationalism]]. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual [[Quantification (science)|quantification]]."<ref>McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. ''[[The Gutenberg Galaxy]]''. p. 154.</ref>{{verify source|date=November 2019}}

==== Global village ====
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic [[interdependence]]" wherein electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation to a [[collective identity]], with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the ''[[global village]]''.{{efn|Sometimes [[Wyndham Lewis]]'s ''America and Cosmic Man'' (1948) and [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'' are credited as the source of the phrase, but neither used the words "global village" specifically as such. According to McLuhan's son [[Eric McLuhan]], his father, a ''Wake'' scholar and a close friend to Lewis, likely discussed the concept with Lewis during their association, but there is no evidence that he got the idea or the phrasing from either; generally, McLuhan is credited as having coined the term.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=McLuhan |first=Eric |year=1996 |title=The Source of the Term 'Global Village' |url=http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm |magazine=McLuhan Studies |issue=2 |access-date=December 30, 2008}}</ref>}}

The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making [[value judgment]]s:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|p=32}}
<blockquote>Instead of tending towards a vast [[Alexandrian library]] the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, [[Authoritarianism|Big Brother]] goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…<p>In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.</p></blockquote>

Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no ''per se'' moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's [[self-concept]]ion and [[Self-realization|realization]]:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|pp=157–158}}

<blockquote>Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds?…<p>Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that [[Detribalization|detribalizes]] or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus, print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this [[visual technology]] by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.</p></blockquote>

The moral [[valence (psychology)|valence]] of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17th century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the [[Causality|causalities]] and effects inherent in our technologies".<ref>''Gutenberg Galaxy'' p. 254.</ref>

Though the World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years after ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'', and 10 years after his death, McLuhan prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:<ref>{{cite web|last=Getto|first=Erica|date=July 14, 2011|title=The Medium Is the Massage: Celebrating Marshall McLuhan's Legacy|url=https://www.wnyc.org/story/145612-celebrating-marshall-mcluhans-legacy/|access-date=April 23, 2015|publisher=WNYC|location=New York|archive-date=April 14, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150414215200/http://www.wnyc.org/story/145612-celebrating-marshall-mcluhans-legacy/|url-status=live}}</ref>

<blockquote>The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.</blockquote>

Furthermore, McLuhan coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term ''[[surfing]]'' to refer to rapid, irregular, and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements such as "[[Heidegger]] surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as [[Descartes]] rode the mechanical wave." [[Paul Levinson]]'s 1999 book ''Digital McLuhan'' explores the ways that McLuhan's work may be understood better through using the lens of the digital revolution.{{sfn|Levinson|1999}}

McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's ''Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue'' (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write ''The Gutenberg Galaxy''. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in ''America''.<ref>''America''. Vol.&nbsp;107. September 15, 1962. pp.&nbsp;743, 747.</ref> However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."<ref>''New Catholic Encyclopedia''. '''8'''. 1967. p.&nbsp;838.</ref> McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [''The Gutenberg Galaxy'']. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of ''Understanding Media'' [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."<ref>{{Cite book |last=McLuhan |first=Marshall |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qBNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+seems+to+me+a+book+that+somebody+should+have+written+a+century+ago.%22 |title=Letters of Marshall McLuhan |date=1987 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-540594-1 |pages=285 |language=en}}</ref>

McLuhan's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy'' won Canada's highest literary award, the [[Governor General's Award for English language non-fiction|Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction]], in 1962.  The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, [[Northrop Frye]].{{sfn|Gordon|1997|p=109}}

=== ''Understanding Media'' (1964) ===
{{Main|Understanding Media}}<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Medeasfhsdl.jpg|right|thumb|upright|Book cover ''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'' by Marshall McLuhan, 1964. It is the source of the phrase [[The medium is the message]].]] -->

McLuhan's best-known work, ''[[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]]'' (1964), is a seminal study in media theory. Dismayed by the way in which people approach and use new media such as television, McLuhan famously argues that in the modern world "we live mythically and integrally…but continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age."{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|p=4}}

McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message". His insight is that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content it delivers, but by its own characteristics. McLuhan points to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, but it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces at night that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan writes, "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|p=8}} More controversially, he postulates that content has little effect on society—for example, whether television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, its effect on society is identical.{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|pp=18, 20}} He notes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book can be reread at will, but a movie must be screened again in its entirety to study any part of it.

==== "Hot" and "cool" media<!--'Hot and cool media' redirects here--> ====
{{anchor|Hot and cool media}}In the first part of ''Understanding Media'', McLuhan writes that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Using terminology derived from French anthropologist [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]]'s distinction between hot and cold societies,<ref name="LS1962"/><ref name="Taunton2019p223" /> McLuhan argues that a '''cool medium'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> requires increased involvement due to decreased description, while a '''hot medium'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in streaming content but does not consider the tool's effects is not allowing an "extension of ourselves".<ref>{{Cite magazine|last=McLuhan|first=Marshall|date=March 1969|title=The Playboy Interview|magazine=Playboy}}</ref> A movie is thus said to be "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|p=22}} "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|p=25}}

Some media, such as movies, are ''hot''—that is, they enhance a single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image. Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement with considerable [[Stimulus (physiology)|stimulus]]. In contrast, "cool" print may also occupy [[visual space]], using [[Visual system|visual senses]], but require focus and comprehension to immerse readers. Hot media creation favour [[Analytic philosophy|analytical]] precision, [[Quantitative research|quantitative analysis]] and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, [[Linearity|linear]], and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media include film (especially [[silent film]]s), radio, the lecture, and photography.

McLuhan contrasts ''hot'' media with ''cool''—specifically, television [of the 1960s i.e. small black-and-white screens], which he claims requires more effort from the viewer to determine meaning; and comics, which, due to their minimal presentation of visual detail, require a high degree of effort to fill in details the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Cool media are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, in addition to television, cool media include [[seminar]]s and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term ''cool media'' as emerging from jazz and popular music used, in this context, to mean "detached".<ref>{{cite web|date=2001-09-11|title=A pop philosopher |url=http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-74-342-1818/people/mcluhan/clip4|access-date=2015-04-23|publisher=CBC Archives |archive-date=2006-06-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060614104059/http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-74-342-1818/people/mcluhan/clip4|url-status=unfit }}</ref>

This appears to force media into binary categories, but McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as [[Dichotomy|dichotomous]] terms.<ref name="LAC" />

==== Critiques of ''Understanding Media'' ====
Some theorists have attacked McLuhan's definition and treatment of the word "[[Media (communication)|medium]]" for being too simplistic. [[Umberto Eco]], for instance, contends that McLuhan's medium conflates channels, [[code]]s, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.{{sfn|Debray|1996}}

In ''Media Manifestos'', [[Régis Debray]] also takes issue with McLuhan's envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:{{sfn|Debray|1996|pp=70–71}}

<blockquote> The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious "mana"; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a ''homo mass-mediaticus'' without ties to historical and social context, and so on.</blockquote>

Furthermore, when ''[[Wired (magazine)|Wired]]'' magazine interviewed him in 1995, Debray said he saw McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.… McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology."<ref>{{cite web|last=Joscelyne|first=Andrew|title=Debray on Technology|url=http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdebray1.htm |website=Generation Online |access-date=2 November 2011|archive-date=19 January 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120119111315/http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdebray1.htm|url-status=live}}</ref>

[[Dwight Macdonald]], in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "[[Aphorism|aphoristic]]" prose style, which he believes leaves ''Understanding Media'' filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."{{sfn|Mullen|2006}}

[[Brian Winston]]'s ''Misunderstanding Media'', published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his [[technological determinism|technologically deterministic]] stances.{{sfn|Mullen|2006}} [[Raymond Williams]] furthers this point of contention, claiming:<ref>{{Cite book|last=Williams|first=Raymond|title=Television: Technology and Cultural Form|publisher=Schocken Books|year=1975|isbn=|location=New York|pages=126–127}}</ref>

<blockquote>The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory&nbsp;... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism.… For if the medium—whether print or television—is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects.</blockquote>

David Carr wrote that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance of sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.<ref>{{cite news|last=Carr|first=David|title=Marshall McLuhan: Media Savant|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all|url-access=limited|access-date=2 November 2011|work=The New York Times|date=January 6, 2011|archive-date=12 January 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150112235815/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all|url-status=live}}</ref>

While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities{{sfn|Grosswiler|1998|pp=155–181}} and suitability for virtual space.{{sfn|Levinson|1999|p=30}}

=== ''The Medium Is the Massage''<!-- "MASSAGE" IS CORRECT, EDITORS, PLEASE NOTE: "The Medium is the MASSAGE" is the correct title. Please DO NOT change "Massage" to "Message" here --> (1967) ===
{{Main|The Medium Is the Massage}}
''[[The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects]]'', published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller,<ref name="wired saint">[[Gary Wolf (journalist)|Wolf, Gary]]. 1 January 1996. "[https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/saint.marshal.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set= The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121103180203/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/saint.marshal.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set= |date=2012-11-03 }}." [[Wired (magazine)|''Wired'']] 4(1). Retrieved 24 June 2020.</ref> "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide."<ref>Marchand, p. 203</ref> Initiated by [[Quentin Fiore]],{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Fiore|1967}} McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human [[sensorium]], taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.{{efn|According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, {{blockquote|by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it.  But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue—the subtitle is 'An Inventory of Effects,' underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.{{sfn|Gordon|1997|p=175}}}}<p>However, the FAQ section on the website maintained by McLuhan's estate says that this interpretation is incomplete and makes its own leap of logic as to why McLuhan left it as is: </p>{{blockquote|Why is the title of the book ''The Medium Is the Massage'' and not ''The Medium is the Message''? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title was supposed to have read ''The Medium is the Message'', but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: ''Message'' and ''Mess Age'', ''Massage'' and ''Mass Age''.}}}}

Fiore, at the time a prominent [[graphic designer]] and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a [[Textuality|textual]] synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" [[Typography|typographic print]] to "scanning" photographic [[facsimile]]s—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.

In ''The Medium Is the Massage'',<!-- BOOK TITLE IS MASSAGE NOT MESSAGE DO NOT CHANGE --> McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's ''The Gutenberg Galaxy''—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.

Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the [[suspension of judgement|suspended judgment]] is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by the [[bard]] abilities of radio, movies and television.{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1964|p=68}}<blockquote>The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in [[Bonanza]]-land.{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Fiore|2008|pp=74–75}}</blockquote>An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by [[Columbia Records]]. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan ''interrupted'' by other speakers, including people speaking in various [[phonation]]s and [[falsetto]]s, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video."{{sfn|Marchand|1998|p=187}}<blockquote>"I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking

"Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey."—"Middle-aged man" speaking</blockquote>

=== ''War and Peace in the Global Village'' (1968) ===
{{Main|War and Peace in the Global Village}}
In ''[[War and Peace in the Global Village]]'', McLuhan used [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'', an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.

Joyce's ''Wake'' is claimed to be a gigantic [[cryptogram]] that reveals a cyclic pattern for human history through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character [[portmanteau]] of other words to create a statement McLuhan likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (many of these themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in ''Wake'' represent different stages in the history of man:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Fiore|1968|pp=46–48}}
*''Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic.'' Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
*''Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry.'' Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
*''Thunder 3: Specialism.'' [[Centralism]] via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
*''Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens.'' Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
*''Thunder 5: Printing.'' Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
*''Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution.'' Extreme development of print process and individualism.
*''Thunder 7: Tribal man again.'' All characters end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
*''Thunder 8: Movies.'' [[Pop art]], pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
*''Thunder 9: Car and Plane.'' Both centralizing and [[Decentralization|decentralizing]] at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
*''Thunder 10: Television.'' Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

=== ''From Cliché to Archetype'' (1970) ===
{{Main|From Cliché to Archetype}}
Collaborating with [[Canadian poetry|Canadian poet]] [[Wilfred Watson]]{{sfn|Theall|2001|p=147}} in ''[[From Cliché to Archetype]]'' (1970), McLuhan approaches the various implications of the verbal [[cliché]] and of the [[archetype]]. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village: the ''global theater''.

In McLuhan's terms, a ''cliché'' is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "[[Anesthesia|anesthetized]]" to its effects. McLuhan provides the example of [[Eugène Ionesco]]'s play ''[[The Bald Soprano]]'', whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an [[Assimil]] language book: "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible."{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Watson|1970|p=4}}

McLuhan's ''archetype'' "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment." ''Environment'' would also include the kinds of "awareness" and [[cognitive shift]]s brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context [[Carl Jung]] described.

McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the ''cliché'' and the ''archetype'', or a "doubleness":{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Watson|1970|p=99}}

<blockquote>Another theme of the Wake [''[[Finnegans Wake]]''] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of [[hendiadys]] dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.</blockquote>

McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the [[Theatre of the Absurd|Theater of the Absurd]]:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Watson|1970|p=5}}
<blockquote>Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.</blockquote>

The "languages of the heart", or what McLuhan otherwise defined as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.

According to McLuhan, the satellite medium encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed."{{sfn|M. McLuhan|Watson|1970|p=9}} All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term ''global theater''. This updates his concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition of the global theater.

=== ''The Global Village'' (1989) ===
{{Main|Global village}}
In his posthumous book, ''[[The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century]]'' (1989), McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provides a strong [[conceptual framework]] for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide [[Electronic communication network|electronic network]]. This is a major work of McLuhan's as it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of ''[[acoustic space]]'', and provides a critique of standard 20th-century communication models such as the [[Shannon–Weaver model]].

McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of ''visual space''—a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model—and that of ''acoustic space''—a [[Holism|holistic]], qualitative order with an intricate, [[paradox]]ical [[topology]]: "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere."<ref>''The Global Village'', p. 74.</ref> The transition from ''visual'' to ''acoustic'' ''space'' was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow"<ref>''The Global Village'', p. 75.</ref> inherently favors [[Right brain|right-brain]] Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the [[Apollo 8]] astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the Moon.

McLuhan illustrates how it feels to exist within acoustic space by quoting from the autobiography of [[Jacques Lusseyran]], ''And There Was Light.''<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Global Village|pages=27–28}}</ref> Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:<blockquote>When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So, there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name—hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were. From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different, but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from a different angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even theories but like whims.<ref>{{Cite book|title=And There Was Light|pages=144}}</ref></blockquote>Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the [[Left-Brain|left brain]] and visual space, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain and acoustic space are the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical. ''"Comprehensive awareness"'' results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of [[Euclidean geometry]], the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is linearly rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory. McLuhan writes about [[robotism]] in the context of [[Japanese Zen Buddhist philosophy|Japanese Zen Buddhism]] and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too related to the left brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of ''[[Blade Runner]]'' and the novels of [[Philip K. Dick]]. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from [[Ruth Benedict]]'s ''[[The Chrysanthemum and the Sword]]'' an anthropological study of [[Culture of Japan|Japanese culture]] published in 1946:<ref>''The Global Village'', p. 76.</ref><blockquote>Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.</blockquote>The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.

==== Beyond existing communication models ====
"All Western scientific models of communication are—like the [[Shannon–Weaver model]]—linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality."<ref>''The Global Village'', p. 77.</ref> McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality.

A third term of ''The Global Village'' that McLuhan and Powers develop at length is [[Tetrad of media effects|The Tetrad]]. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974.{{sfn|M. McLuhan|E. McLuhan|1988|p=74}} The tetrad is an analogical, simultaneous, fourfold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other."<ref>''The Global Village'', p. 78.</ref> Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbius [[topological structure]] of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network.