Understanding Media Intensive is a 12-part look at media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s major 1964 work “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” taught by Andrew McLuhan, Director of The McLuhan Institute. In an age where our media environment conditions and structures our…

A book is a beginning. In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living things—but I know differently: books,…

Phenomenology is treated ambiguously in McLuhan’s posthumous Laws of Media, which was edited and co-authored by his son, Eric. On the one hand, it is seen as an abstract attempt1 to achieve what could not, in McLuhan’s view, be achieved in this…

With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines. – Understanding Media, 1964 Centralism depends on margins that…