Blowing Hot & Cold

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA by Marshall McLuhan. 359 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.50.

Every so often, the semi-intellectual communities at the fringes of the arts, the universities, and the communications industries are hit by a new book, which becomes a fad or a parlor game. This summer's possible candidate, with what may be just the right combination of intelligence, arrogance and pseudo science, is Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

Seamless Web. Author McLuhan is a University of Toronto professor and literary critic, who writes books (first was The Gutenberg Galaxy) to prove that books are responsible for most of the ills of modern man. Nationalism, war, industrialization, population explosion, the breakdown of human relations in urbanized chaos--McLuhan blames them all on Gutenberg's invention of movable type, and the resulting growth of both the audience and the technology for communication-by-print.

The trouble is that print is what McLuhan calls a "hot" medium of communication: sharp in definition, filled with data, exclusively visual and verbal, but (a key and debatable point) psychologically damaging and low in audience participation. Other hot media by McLuhan's rules are photography, movies, competitive spectator sports and radio. Hot media make men think logically and independently, instead of naturally, "mythically" and communally. This is bad. What McLuhan likes are cool media. These are fuzzy, low in information, but richly demanding on the audience to fill in what is missing. The telephone, modern painting, but pre-eminently television are cool and good. Television and other "electric media" are oral-auditory, tactile, visceral, and involve the individual almost without volition. As a result McLuhan believes that the world is rapidly becoming a "global village," in which mankind communicates in a supermodern version of the way tribal societies were once related. In the coming overthrow of typographic and literate communications McLuhan expresses his grotesque hope that modern man can be put "back into the tribal or oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence."

Pseudo Science. As an intellectual game called "cool and hot," the system has great possibilities for a chatty weekend at Big Sur or Martha's Vineyard. Clocks (hot), money (hot), clothes (getting cooler in the U.S.), nudity (very cool), and almost anything else can be interpreted as media by McLuhan's rules. "Backward countries are cool, and we are hot." Autos are hot. The "blurry, shaggy texture of Kennedy" was a natural for cool TV, which is why "sharp, intense" Nixon lost the debates. Private enterprise is hot; public debt is cool, Iago is cool, but Othello hot. Girls who wear glasses don't get passes--because they are hot.

Yet McLuhan is not playing games. He is in humorless earnest. And if the book is taken seriously, it must be judged as fuzzy-minded, lacking in perspective, low in definition and data, redundant, and contemptuous of logical sequence--which is to say that McLuhan has perfectly illustrated the cool qualities he most values in communications. McLuhan's solemn pseudo science at work: "What do we know about the social or psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure in Europe?" Or: "Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign, he would have vanished quickly."

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