These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.” This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it.
The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent? Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
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