Upon first reading, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media seems to be fraught with contradictions. I’ll list – and attempt to work through them – here:

1. Media as numbing versus media as “illuminating” Initially, media for McLuhan, much like cinema for Benjamin, is a “shock” to our sensorium. In the first chapter he claims “our conventional response to all media . . . . is the numb stance of the technological idiot” (31). Later he goes as far to say that technology was such a shock to our bodies that we had no choice but to create an external nervous system (the computer). However, as we begin to assess the total “effects” of media, we begin to see the whole picture, an assortment of perspectives – much like one would in a Cubist painting. The electric age gives us “the means of instant, total field-awareness” (69). Which leads me to . . .

2. Electricity as decentralizing versus electricity as “social” . . . the “social consciousness” that electricity “hoicked up into full view” (69). This feels different from McLuhan’s earlier assertion that electricity decentralizes. He argues that electricity allows us to turn inward, to privatize, to tackle all tasks independently, without relying on others in our “tribe.” At the conclusion of chapter six however, McLuhan suggests that electricity can also bring us back to a collectivized, and perhaps even better tribe, asking, “might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?” (90)

3. Art as aesthetic versus art as “practical” Artists, for McLuhan, have an “antennae” that others do not; they can diagnose the conditions of present society much more acutely than the everyman. Thus putting the artist in the “control room” is the only way to shows us the way out of the shock, numbness, and “irritation” that media induces. But once art helps us “transfer our consciousness to a computer world [so] we shall be able to program consciousness in such ways that it cannot be numbed nor distracted” (89), is there a need for it any longer?