Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
Published 1964 · 400 pages · 124,154 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Understanding Media to read?
Understanding Media scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- McLuhan coins and redefines terms such as 'hot' and 'cool' media, 'extensions', 'retribalization' and 'Narcissus narcosis'. He mixes sociological, anthropological and literary diction with puns. The effect is closer to Notes from Underground in compactness than to Joyce, though the idiom is distinctly his own.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are mostly short, declarative and aphoristic, but they are stacked in mosaic paragraphs with abrupt jumps and little connective logic. Reading demands work at the level of the paragraph rather than the clause.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- The book theorizes about perception, sense ratios and civilization, anchored by examples like the clock, the telephone and the typewriter. Ideas drive the text rather than events.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Twenty-six chapters range across history, anthropology, art, advertising and technology, with a new claim or allusion in almost every paragraph. The density is closer to Moby-Dick's digressions than to a conventional argument.
How Understanding Media is regarded
Understanding Media holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.