McLuhan is clearly in favor of media studies being understood as a study of medium itself, rather than what a medium may convey, but he seems torn, on occasion, about the way he values certain mediums, and whether contemporary modern electric mediums don't represent some kind of "threat".
McLuhan writes, about halfway through the selected section, that "the American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology." Obviously, McLuhan's contemporary "electric technology" was the television, and in some ways much more divorced from literacy than what we see as the forefront of electric technology today, but the quote still seems disingenuous. Even if they're part of what the medium "conveys" through programming, television still represents the mediums of speech and text, and in the case of Closed Captioning and consumers who might need it to experience the medium, it's an essential part of the medium of television, with no relevance to the conveyance.
The video below isn't so much related to this quote as it is to the general perception of McLuhan, but this clip from Annie Hall -- featuring Marshall McLuhan -- is an interesting example of the way people misperceive McLuhan's work, featuring both the movie patron in line, and more metatextually, Woody Allen, as a director.
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