Understanding media. External extensions of a person

The classic text on the theory of the media, the book “Understanding the Media” of the Canadian philosopher, philologist and culturologist Marshall Herbert Makluen (1911–1980), was published in 1964, for twenty years anticipating the emergence of a personal computer and by thirty - the spread of the Internet. The term “global village” and the thesis “means of communication is a message” gained the most widespread in science, literature and journalism. Starting from electric light, which is understood as “pure information, remedy without message”, Maklyuen analyzes the means of communication, dividing them into hot and cold, definite and vague, requiring the participation of the addressee (type of phone) or not involving it (such as a radio) The narrative is witty and emotionally constructed, in which Shakespeare’s poems are adjacent to the newspaper quotes and theses of Toynbee and Tokville, leads the author to the original conclusions: the era of electrical information turns out to be an era of anxiety and fatigue, numbness and apathy, as well as an era of awareness of the unconscious, in which “we wear we wear On itself, like your skin, all of humanity. ”