![]() This essay is more interpretative than pedagogical. In this essay I will explain how I interpret McLuhan’s Understanding Media to my students. ![]() This, of course, presents some difficulties in McLuhan’s case because of his nonlinear style and the complexity of his ideas. 2 When teaching major theorists such as McLuhan, I prefer to expose students to the original texts rather than distillations provided by another author whenever possible. I have been teaching Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media to undergraduates for 18 years. With its mosaic style Understanding Media is not an easy book to understand or to teach to students. Terrance Gordon argues that “ Understanding Media occupies a central place in McLuhan’s work” but also says that the book “defies summary” (“Editor’s Introduction” xiii). More recently, Nicholas Carr wrote that Understanding Media is “oracular, gnomic, and mind-bending” (1). ![]() ![]() At the time the Commonweal Review called the book “infuriating, brilliant, and incoherent” (Gordon, "Critical Reception" 545). 1 With these words on the first page of Understanding Media published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan burst onto the intellectual scene with his most influential book. “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding” (McLuhan 3). ![]()
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