Icy Flame

This model of the mass media by the German academic Maletzke looks at first sight as if it might be a map of the Berlin underground. Don't be put off by its apparent complexity, though. Take the time to examine the whole model and take a careful look at the elements Maletzke lists. Although it may seem very complicated, you should immediately recognise some elements common to most general communication models, namely Communicator (C), Message (M), Medium and Receiver (R).

Although Maletzke's Model (1963) is perhaps now a little dated, you will probably find that, together with Berlo's S-M-C-R Model, this is one of the most useful general models to guide you through the various stages of developing practical work, even if you don't think of your artefact as belonging to the 'mass media'.

It is a particularly useful model in outlining the gatekeeping process at the Communicator 'end' of the process.

As you complete practical work, it's worth taking out some time to reflect on the choices you have made and to consider to what extent they have been determined by the factors Maletzke lists.

It's of some interest to note that Maletzke's model comprises four major elements, whereas the Lasswell Formula, which underlies many communication models, comprises five. Maletzke argues that the 'with what effect?' component of Lasswell's model properly belongs to sociological and psychological study of the receiver and should therefore not be introduced as a fifth component. He mentions in passing that other commentators have introduced a variety of different elements, for example:

Braddock has seven: 'Who says what to whom under what circumstances through what medium and with what effect? (Braddock, through further segmentation, eventually arrives at 84)
McLuhan has seven: source of information, the sensing process, sending, the flight of information or transportation of information, receiving, decision-making, the action
Gerbner differentiates between ten: (1)Someone (2)perceives an (3)event and (4)reacts in a (5)situation thorugh some (6)means to make available (7)materials in some (8)form and (9)context conveying (10)content of some consequence.
Maletzke insists that only four major categories are sufficient.

If you have looked through the examples of typical everyday forms of communication, you will have noticed that some of the examples refer to less immediate methods of communication than face-to-face interaction, e.g. using the radio, newspapers or the telephone. In these cases, technology is introduced.

When, for instance, the telephone is used, you speak, the phone turns the sound waves into electrical impulses and those electrical impulses are turned back into sound waves by the phone at the other end of the line.
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver produced a general model of communication:


This is now known after them as the Shannon-Weaver Model. Although they were principally concerned with communication technology, their model has become one which is frequently introduced to students of human communication early in their study. However, despite the fact that it is frequently used early in the study of human communication, I think it's worth bearing in mind that information theory, or statistical communication theory was initially developed to separate noise from information-carrying signals. That involved breaking down an information system into sub-systems so as to evaluate the efficiency of various communication channels and codes. You might ask yourself how viable the transfer of Shannon's insights from information theory to human communication is likely to be. The concepts of information theory and cybernetics are essentially mathematical and are intended to be applied to technical problems under clearly defined conditions. After you've read this section, which, I think, is a reasonable attempt to loosely apply Shannon's ideas to human communication, ask yourself whether you feel enlightened.

The Shannon-Weaver Model (1947) proposes that all communication must include six elements:

a source
an encoder
a message
a channel
a decoder
a receiver
These six elements are shown graphically in the model. As Shannon was researching in the field of information theory, his model was initially very technology-oriented. The model was produced in 1949, a year after Lasswell's and you will immediately see the similarity to the Lasswell Formula

The emphasis here is very much on the transmission and reception of information. 'Information' is understood rather differently from the way you and I would normally use the term, as well. This model is often referred to as an 'information model' of communication. (But you don't need to worry about that if you're just starting.)

Apart from its obvious technological bias, a drawback from our point of view is the model's obvious linearity. It looks at communication as a one-way process. That is remedied by the addition of the feedback loop which you can see in the developed version of the model:


Some essential cencepts for this model:

1. The Source
All human communication has some source (information source in Shannon's terminology), some person or group of persons with a given purpose, a reason for engaging in communication. You'll also find the terms transmitter and communicator used.
For a fuller discussion of 'source', see The Lasswell Formula


2. The Encoder
When you communicate, you have a particular purpose in mind:

you want to show that you're a friendly person
you want to give them some information
you want to get them to do something
you want to persuade them of your point of view
and so on. You, as the source, have to express your purpose in the form of a message. That message has to be formulated in some kind of code. How do the source's purposes get translated into a code? This requires an encoder. The communication encoder is responsible for taking the ideas of the source and putting them in code, expressing the source's purpose in the form of a message.

It's fairly easy to think in terms of source and encoder when you are talking on the phone (transmitter in Shannon's terminology). You are the source of the message and the 'phone is the encoder which does the job of turning your sounds into electrical impulses. The distinction is not quite so obvious when you think of yourself communicating face-to-face.

In person-to-person communication, the encoding process is performed by the motor skills of the source - vocal mechanisms (lip and tongue movements, the vocal cords, the lungs, face muscles etc.), muscles in the hand and so on. Some people's encoding systems are not as efficient as others'. So, for example, a disabled person might not be able to control movement of their limbs and so find it difficult to encode the intended non-verbal messages or they may communicate unintended messages. A person who has suffered throat cancer may have had their vocal cords removed. They can encode their messages verbally using an artificial aid, but much of the non-verbal messages most of us send via pitch, intonation, volume and so on cannot be encoded.

Shannon was not particularly concerned with the communication of meanings. In fact, it is Wilbur Schramm's model of 1954 which places greater emphasis on the processes of encoding and decoding. The inclusion of the encoding and decoding processes is very helpful to us since it draws our attention to the possibility of a mismatch between the operation of the encoding and decoding devices, which can cause semantic noise to be set up. With good reason, the source of the message may wonder whether the picture in the receiver's head will bear any resemblance to what's in his/her own. Schramm went on to introduce the notion of a 'field of experience', which shows a much greater awareness of the subtleties involved in human-to-human communication, drawing our attention to the numerous shared socio-cultural factors which are necessary for successful communication to take place (see David Berlo's S-M-C-R model).


3. The Message
The message of course is what communication is all about. Whatever is communicated is the message. Denis McQuail (1975) in his book Communication writes that the simplest way of regarding human communication is 'to consider it as the sending from one person to another of meaningful messages'.

The Shannon-Weaver Model, in common with many others separates the message from other components of the process of communication. In reality, though, you can only reasonably examine the message within the context of all the other interlinked elements. Whenever we are in contact with other people we and they are involved in sending and receiving messages. The crucial question for Communication Studies is: to what extent does the message received correspond to the message transmitted? That's where all the other factors in the communication process come into play.

The Shannon-Weaver model and others like it tends to portray the message as a relatively uncomplicated matter. Note that this is not a criticism of Shannon since meanings were simply not his concern:


Frequently the messages have meaning, that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These considerations are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
1949

This was particularly emphasized in Warren Weaver's introduction to Shannon's paper:

The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular information must not be confused with meaning.
In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.
It may however be a criticism of the application of Shannon's model to the more general area of human-to-human communication. Meanings are assumed to be somehow contained within the signs used in the message and the receiver can, as it were, take them out again. Matters such as the social context in which the message is transmitted, the assumptions made by source and receiver, their past experiences and so on are simply disregarded. In this respect, models which incorporate such factors are probably more revealing of the complexity of the communication process. (See, for example, the sections on Berlo's SMCR model or Maletzke's model of mass communication)


4. The Channel
You tap on a membrane suspended above a steadily flowing jet of water. The air under the membrane causes slight deflections in the jet of water. A laser is aimed at a receiver. The jet of water flows through the laser beam, deflecting it from its target. Every time the water jet is deflected by the movement of the air, the laser beam hits its target. The laser receiver is connected to a computer which takes each 'hit' and turns it into a 1 and each miss and turns it into a 0. The computer sends these etc. etc......

You get the idea: the air waves, the jet of water and so on are all channels. The words channel and medium are often used interchangeably, if slightly inaccurately. The choice (a pretty stupid one above) of the appropriate channel is a vitally important choice in communication. It's obvious that you don't use the visual channel to communicate with the blind or the auditory channel with the deaf, but there are more subtle considerations to be taken into account as well.


5.1 Physical noise
Shannon is generally considered to have been primarily concerned with physical (or 'mechanical' or 'engineering') noise in the channel, i.e. unexplained variation in a communication channel or random error in the transmission of information. Everyday examples of physical noise are:

a loud motorbike roaring down the road while you're trying to hold a conversation
your little brother standing in front of the TV set
mist on the inside of the car windscreen
smudges on a printed page
'snow' on a TV set
It might seem odd to use the word noise in this way, unless perhaps you're a hi-fi buff, in which case you'll be familiar with looking up the claimed 'signal-to-noise ratio' for the various bits of equipment you buy. In this technical sense, 'noise' is not necessarily audible. Thus a TV technician might speak of a 'noisy picture'. Generally speaking, in this kind of everyday communication, we're fairly good at avoiding physical noise: we shout when the motorbike goes past; you clout your little brother; cars have demisters.

However, it is possible for a message to be distorted by channel overload. Channel overload is not due to any noise source, but rather to the channel capacity being exceeded. You may come across that at a party where you are holding a conversation amidst lots of others going on around you or, perhaps, in a Communication lesson where everyone has split into small groups for discussion or simulations.

Shannon and Weaver were primarily involved with the investigation of technological communication. Their model is perhaps more accurately referred to as a model of information theory (rather than communication theory). Consequently, their main concern was with the kind of physical (or mechanical) noise discussed above.

Although physical noise and how to avoid it is certainly a major concern of scholars of communication, the Shannon and Weaver model turns out to be particularly suggestive in the study of human communication because of its introduction of a decoding device and an encoding device. The possibility of a mismatch between the two devices raises a number of interesting questions. In technological communication: I give you a PC disk and you stick it into a Mac - the Mac can't decode it; I give you an American NTSC video tape and you stick it into a European PAL video recorder - the recorder won't decode it. Transfer this notion of a mismatch between the encoding and decoding devices to the study of human communication and you're looking at what is normally referred to as semantic noise (see below). That concept then leads us on to the study of social class, cultural background, experience, attitudes, beliefs and a whole range of other factors which can introduce noise into communication.

It might be worth mentioning here, especially in connexion with the reference to the linearity of the Shannon-Weaver model, that some workers in the newly developing science of complexity have pointed to a fundamental twin flaw in our science since Newton (I am greatly simplifying here), namely that science has been concerned to understand the world using linear models and has also been concerned to discount as 'experimental noise' anything which might hinder the application of a linear model. Complexity theorists point out that when you add the noise into the system, you generally end up with something non-linear, complex, unpredictable.


5.2 Semantic noise
Semantic noise is not as easy to deal with as physical noise. It might not be an exaggeration to say that the very essence of the study of human communication is to find ways of avoiding semantic noise. Semantic noise is difficult to define. It may be related to people's knowledge level, their communication skills, their experience, their prejudices and so on. There is more detailed discussion of those factors in Berlo's SMCR Model.

Examples of semantic noise would include:

Distraction: You are physically very attracted to the person who is talking to you. As a result, your attention is directed to their deep blue eyes rather than what they are saying. There is no physical noise which prevents the message from reaching you. You hear it, but you don't decode it. Equally, your attention could be distracted by the other person's peculiar tics and so on. Or think of when you watched the TV news: the reporter was standing outside No.10 Downing Street, but behind him the policeman outside the door was picking his nose. As soon as the report's over you realize you haven't a clue what it was about.
Differences in the use of the code: The other person is waffling on in Aramaic about fishes and loaves. You don't understand. There is nothing which physically prevents the elements of the message from reaching you, you simply can't understand it.
Emphasising the wrong part of the message: Maybe you can think of an advertising campaign which has been so successful with some new style or gimmick that everyone is talking about it. However, no one has actually noticed what product is being advertised.
Attitude towards the sender: You're talking to someone a lot older than you. On the basis of their age, you make a lot of assumptions about the kind of code appropriate to them - and the conversation goes wrong because they were the wrong assumptions.
Attitude towards the message: I may have a very positive attitude to the Aramaic-speaking bearded chap in the flowing robes. But, despite that, I'd be unlikely to find him very persuasive even if he were talking to me in English about his fishes and his loaves. He believes in transcendent beings and I don't. Whilst I may respect his right to hold to what I consider to be silly convictions, I can find little respect for the beliefs themselves. So, unless he can find what I consider a more convincing explanation of this particular trick, he's wasting his breath, however convinced he may be.


6. The Decoder
Just as a source needs an encoder to translate her purposes into a message, so the receiver needs a decoder to retranslate. The decoder (receiver in Shannon's paper) is an interesting and very useful development over, say, the Lasswell Formula.

If you take a look at our discussion of the receiver, you'll see that we considered how, for example, a blind person would not have the equipment to receive whatever non-verbal messages you send in the visual channel. The notion of a decoder reminds us that it is quite possible for a person to have all the equipment required to receive the messages you send (all five senses, any necessary technology and so on) and yet be unable to decode your messages.

Can you think of where you might come across a similar inability to decode where the English language is concerned? Suppose you've been reading around Communication Studies and have come across a reference to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. So you ask your teacher about him. She replies, "Well, the Critique of Pure Reason is essentially all about answering the question: how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" Eh? You probably have a meaning for every one of those words, except perhaps 'a priori'. You might perhaps guess that she is using the title of one of Kant's works in her answer. But the statement is incomprehensible unless you know the technical jargon of philosophy. You can't decode the message - and your teacher is a pretty lousy teacher for having failed to predict your inability to decode it (or for having accurately predicted your inability and using it as an excuse to show off!).

we make the false assumption that receivers decode messages in the same way we do, that they use the code in the same way. There's a whole host of reasons why they won't - age differences, class differences, cultural differences and so on (dealt with more thoroughly in Berlo's SMCR Model).


8. The Receiver
For communication to occur, there must be somebody at the other end of the channel. This person or persons can be called the receiver. To put it in Shannon's terms, information transmitters and receivers must be similar systems. If they are not, communication cannot occur. (Actually Shannon used the term destination, reserving the term receiver for what we have called decoder. However, I think the terminology I have been using is more common in the broader understanding of 'communication theory' as distinct from Shannon's information theory.)

What that probably meant as far as he was concerned was that you need a telephone at one end and a telephone at the other, not a telephone connected to a radio. In rather more obviously human terms, the receiver needs to have the equipment to receive the message. A totally blind person has the mental equipment to decode your gestures, but no system for receiving messages in the visual channel. So, your non-verbal messages are not received and you're wasting your energy. See also the Lasswell Formula for a more detailed discussion of 'receiver'.


9. Feedback
Feedback is a vital part of communication. When we are talking to someone over the phone, if they don't give us the occasional 'mmmm', 'aaah', 'yes, I see' and so on, it can be very disconcerting. .This lack of feedback explains why most of us don't like ansaphones. In face-to-face communication, we get feedback in the visual channel as well - head nods, smiles, frowns, changes in posture and orientation, gaze and so on. Advertisers need feedback which they get in the form of market research from institutions like Gallup. How else would they know if their ads are on the right track? Broadcasters need feedback which they get from BARB's ratings. Politicians need feedback which they get from public opinion polls and so on.

Why do people often have difficulty when using computers, when they find it perfectly easy to drive a car? You'd think it should be easier to operate a computer - after all there are only a few keys and a mouse, as against levers, pedals and a steering wheel. A computer's not likely to kill you, either. It could be due to the lack of feedback - in a car, you've the sound of the engine, the speed of the landscape rushing past, the force of gravity. Feedback is coming at you through sight, hearing and touch -overdo it and it might come through smell as well! With a computer, there's very little of that.





Well, that's the Shannon-Weaver model. Do you feel enlightened? I shouldn't imagine that any student of human-to-human communication would feel especially enlightened by Shannon's original paper, since it's all to do with information theory and, in essence, human beings don't process information, but process meanings. In the above discussion of the model I have often referred to meaning, a topic largely absent from the original model, but it is only by broadening the model to take in meaning and the biological, cognitive, technological, socio-cultural and other factors which influence it that this model can be of any use.

However, it has to be said that the model's separation of the communication process into discrete units has proved fruitful and has formed the basis of several other models which provide some more insightful elaboration of the human communication process. However, in disregarding meaning it may well be downright misleading. Those researchers who take this model and simply slap meaning on top of it are probably even more misleading. Some models developed upon the basic constituents of the Shannon-Weaver model are linked to below under 'related articles'. I would refer you also to the article on criticism of transmission models.

Famous people in mass communication history: 1
Harold D. lasswell.
Harold Lasswell was one of the great scholarly figures of the twentieth century. Two biographies of him follow:

lasswell formula model= 5w

Essential concept for Lasswell's formula

1.1Communicator:
Lasswell was primarily concerned with mass communication. In every form of communication, though, there must be someone (or something) that communicates.
How appropriate is the term communicator? You might say that you can't really talk about communication if the audience for the message don't respond appropriately. Maybe that's a reason that many communication specialists refer to the communicator as source or transmitter or sender of the message - at least that doesn't presuppose that communication does actually take place.
1.2Control analysis
Because of the application of Lasswell's Formula to the media, his question Who? has come to be associated mainly with control analysis:
who owns this newspaper?
what are their aims?
what are their political allegiances?
do they attempt to set the editorial policy?
does the fact that they are a republican account for the newspaper's repeated attacks on the Royal Family?
are they subject to any kind of legal constraints?
how does the editor decide what to put in the paper?
and so on.
Can you see, though, how that sort of question can be applied to, say, interpersonal communication? You're asking a similar sort of question when, reflecting on a comment someone has just made, you say to yourself something like: 'Blimey, that was a strange thing to say. He must be really weird.

2.1 The Message
Being concerned with the mass media, Lasswell was particularly concerned with the messages present in the media. This relates to an area of study known as content research. Typically, content research is applied to questions of representation, for example: how are women represented in the tabloid press? or: how are blacks represented on television? or: how is our society represented to us in the movies? Content research will often be a matter of counting the number of occurrences of a particular representation (for example, the housewife and mother who does not work outside the home) and comparing that with some kind of 'objective' measure, such as official statistics.

2.2 Interpersonal communication
What about our everyday communication, though? Do you spend much time thinking about how best to formulate your messages? In much of our everyday interpersonal communication with our friends, we probably are not all that conscious of thinking much about our messages. Still, you can probably think of certain messages you are communicating now to anyone passing by as you read through this. Think about it for a minute -
what clothes are you wearing?
how is your hair done?
are you wearing specs?
what about that deodorant?
The answers to those questions may not be the result of a lot of thought before you left home this morning, but they are the result of a variety of decisions about the image you want to project of yourself - the messages about you, your personality, your tastes in music etc.
No doubt also during the day, there'll be certain messages you will think about more carefully - that thank you letter you've got to send; that excuse you've got to find for not handing in your essay; that way of telling that person you wish they'd really leave you alone.



3.1 Channel
The channel is what carries the message. If I speak to you my words are carried via the channel of air waves, the radio news is carried by both air waves and radio waves. I could tap out a message on the back of your head in Morse Code, in which case the channel is touch. In simple terms, messages can be sent in channels corresponding to your five senses.
This use of the word 'channel' is similar to the use of the word medium when we talk about communication. The words are sometimes used interchangeably. However, strictly speaking, we often use the word medium to refer to a combination of different channels. Television for example uses both the auditory channel (sound) and visual channel (sight).
3.2 Media analysis
The question of which channel or medium to use to carry the message is a vitally important one in all communication. Can you think of any examples of when you might have chosen the wrong channel to communicate with someone? An obvious example of the possible pitfalls would be trying to use the telephone to communicate with a profoundly deaf person. For some time I taught a blind person how to use a computer. As you can probably imagine, it was incredibly difficult to use the auditory channel only.
3.3 The choice of medium for your practical work
You could, for example, produce a very polished video tape for your practical work, but is it appropriate? Can you think why it might be the wrong medium? If you don't know how to distribute it to the intended audience, or if your audience can't afford to buy it, you could well have wasted your time. You might well have been better advised to produce a leaflet - less impressive perhaps, but cheaper and easier to distribute. Video is also a very linear medium - you start at the beginning and work your way through to the end - if you're communicating information which your audience already know a lot of, maybe they would have been better off with a booklet that they can skim through to find something they don't already know. Video isn't easily portable either - if your audience need to refer back to your information, then a booklet they can stuff in their pocket might be a better bet.
When you produce your practical work, you'll have to investigate the possible media available for the message you want to communicate, asking questions like:
what are the conventions of this medium?
is this medium appropriate to my audience?
does it appeal to them?
how will they get hold of it?
can they afford it?
is this medium appropriate to my message?
can it explain what I want it to explain?
do I need to show this in pictures or words?
and so on.
These are all questions of 'media analysis'. Advertising agencies employ Media Buyers who decide what is the most suitable medium, or combination of media (newspapers, billboards, flysheets, TV ads etc.) for the type of message they want to communicate. They will also have decided on a particular target audience they want to communicate it to and so, using, say the TGI, the NRS etc., will decide what is the most appropriate magazine, newspaper to reach that audience.
A classic example of using the wrong channel is that of research conducted by an American newspaper on the eve of the Presidential elections in the 1940's. The message was simple: Who will you vote for? The audience was easy to define: a random sample of voters. The newspaper duly conducted a telephone poll of voters chosen at random from the phone book and announced that the Republicans would win. In fact the Democrats won with a massive victory. The reason they got it wrong was quite simple: at that time only the wealthier members of society would have telephones and the wealthier members of society would vote Republican.
You should also give some thought to the notion of channel capacity, which is quite clearly defined in information theory, but less clear in everyday communication. Certainly, though, it's clear that there are limits to the information which can be carried in a single channel - hence the need to think about channel redundancy as a means of carrying more of the message of your practical work.

4.1 The Receiver
Many Communication scholars use the rather technological-sounding terms: sender, source or transmitter to refer to the Communicator. You'll also come across the technological receiver to refer to what we might ordinarily call audience or readership. This whole question of audience is vitally important to successful communication.
4.2 Audience research
Professional broadcasters use the ratings figures and other data from BARB and advertisers in the print media use information from Gallup, the TGI and a range of other sources to find out as much as they possibly can about their audiences.
4.3 Audience research and your practical work
When you come to do your practical work, you'll probably need to demonstrate that you have found out as much as you reasonably can about your audience, using the appropriate techniques. Because it's so important, we have a unit devoted entirely to Researching Your Audience.
4.4 Interpersonal communication
It's not only the mass media, though, where knowledge of our audience is vitally important. The same applies in everyday life in our contact with other people. In many cases, we don't have to know a lot about the person we're dealing with because we each act out the appropriate r鬺e. I don't have to know anything about the shop assistant who sells me a packet of fags - I ask for the fags, he gives me them, I give him the money, he gives me the change, we smile briefly, say 'Cheerio' and that's it. I don't need to know anything about him.
But there are numerous occasions when we do need to know more, or we make unjustified assumptions about what our audience are like. Can you think of any examples from your everyday life where communication has broken down because you didn't know enough about your audience or because you made the wrong guess as to what they were like? What about the teacher who waffles on incomprehensibly because she makes the assumption that you know nearly as much about the subject as she does? Or that you actually remember what she told you last lesson? Or that you're actually interested in the subject?

5.1 Effects
Lasswell's model also introduces us to the question of media effects. We don't communicate in a vacuum. We normally communicate because we want to achieve something. Even if we just pass someone in the corridor and say 'hello' without really thinking about it, we want to have the effect of reassuring them that we're still friends, we are nice people, and so on.
5.2 Practical work
Lasswell was concerned not with interpersonal communication, but with the effects of the mass media. The question of whether the media have any effect or not and, if so, how they affect their audiences, is not just a large chunk of most communication and media courses, it's also a question you have to answer about your practical work and, of course, it's a constantly topical issue in society.
5.3 Feedback
To find out what kind of effect our communication has, we need some kind of feedback. If I speak to you, I listen to your responses and watch for signs of interest, boredom etc. In other words, I use feedback from you to gauge the effect of my communication. If you give me positive feedback by showing interest, I'll continue in the same vein; if you give me negative feedback by showing boredom, I'll change the subject, or change my style, or stop speaking. When broadcasters transmit a programme, they use the services of BARB to gain feedback in the form of ratings. Advertising agencies use a variety of services, such as Gallup, to find out whether their campaign has worked. These are all forms of feedback.
Feedback is not shown specifically in Lasswell's formula, but very many communication models do show it. A simple one which does so is the Shannon-Weaver Model.

The book leading me to the road of mass communication is Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
by Marshall McLuhan, Lewis H. Lapham
I am majoring in journalism and mass communication and I am really interested in this subject:)I am sociable, easy-going and have great curiosity, always like to meet different kinds of people and learn different culture. Also I am so fascinated by the media.
Have you heard of Marshall McLuhan? OK, maybe not. However I bet you've learnt about some terms and prhases such as "the global village","Media is message","hot media and cold media" in your daily life so far.
The book is challenging and it is scattered and chaotic but there is a cohesiveness to it.

Here is a review of this book written by one reader Anthony M. Testani"mygotta from Amszon.com :

Marshall McLuhan is perhaps one of the most influential authors I have read along with Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Eliphas Levi. What McLuhan does like the authors stated is not explain in descriptive terms the media, but process oriented direction of experience. I will explain that momentarily.
This book, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" is by far McLuhan's greatest book. It is set up like any useful text with the first part being the theory, while the second part contains the practice. He explains in the theoretical part that media is the extension of man. That all things created by man have come from man's own experience. This is like a dream, in one sense, where one must determine at some point that they are creators of the dream, and therefore, all content of the dream must apply to the dreamer's existence, and no one elses. Likewise, all inventions and discoveries are aspects of human dimensions that have been created by man, and therefore must come from man's inner experiences. These inventions are ultimately what McLuhan calls extensions, as they extend our human capacity for that movement or experience. The foot can travel so fast, while the tire is the extension of the foot, and therefore can move at a much higher rate of speed than the foot.

It seems that the most confusing aspect of McLuhan's theories is the idea of content versus context. The assumption of media study is to psychologize advertisments or the like. This way of approach is far from his point. He says, "My own way of approaching the media is perceptual not conceptual." What he is saying is that he uses his senses to gain understanding of the media, not theoretical concepts. This is what I mean about process oriented experience, where McLuhan discusses the experience one has by, say watching television, the mode of thought one has, the patterns of thought and behavior created by television.

In other words, we become the media that we have been shaped by in our culture and time. The spoken word, the written word and the telegraph, McLuhan noted, has had the largest impact on our society. Not because of their usefulness, or whether they work or not, but because society has patterned themselves after the respective media. Are not we becoming a computerized society? Does this mean we have lots of computers that run things? Or are the people becoming computer like in their behavoir and thinking? The latter expresses more accurately McLuhan's ideas.

The second part runs over a select group of specific media and their implications on the human mind. The context in which they were placed in is by far the most important aspect as it predicts when a new media might arise. All media have their logical origins. If one determine the state of the world now, as it is, one can determine the way of the media. McLuhan discusses the written and printed word, automobile, telegraph, aeroplanes, bikes, routes, newspapers, automation, games, weapons, and many others that make for a highly evocative read.

Is McLuhan a modern mystic? It might be a heavy title for some. If one reads well enough into his work, they may get the sense he is not talking about media at all.

Understanding McLuhan's approach is about upsetting the whole sensory environment. The appeal McLuhan has had on the ages from 1964, when the book was published, is in his aphorism, "Media is the message." This little phrase scratched many heads. Most of McLuhan's writings are like this. It is not about explaining it, but involving the reader to think for himself. To evoke, as in, evocative. So the conclusions must be the readers choice, either by intuition, study, assumption, or first hand experience. One thing is for certain, if you take the time to read the book twice, it will be different than the first read.

I can say, "if you only read one book..." but those that read this book are usually of the literate group. But for me, this book has not been an informative text, but a work book, a guide, an insightful prayer book, a reference, a resource, a magical text. I cannot reccomend this book highly enough.