Prefazione

The Introduction to the new edition of the Italian translation of Understanding Media (originally published in 1967) is both a guide to the reading of the book and an assessment of its role and importance, not only in the specialistic field of media studies, but also, more in general, in contemporary culture. As a guide for the reading it aims not so much to synthetize the principal theses of the book as to explain the peculiarities of its style and to offer the reader some basic categories in order to start, based on a rich didactic experience. The challenges McLuhan launched to his time and also continues to launch to the Internet age audience should not be interpreted as the fruit of an abstruse style for the sake of itself, nor as the consequence of an over-academic complexity, but as a part of the richness of his work, McLuhan being one of the very few intellectuals of last century who have tried to use the lesson of literary avant-garde as a tool for knowledge, and who have been able to “probe” (to use its own favourite terme) a series of phenomena that had been taken for granted, both in culture and technology. The assessment of McLuhan's role in contemporary culture is based on the definition of his work, and of this book in particular, as a “reluctant classic”: a classic, a thinker whom every generation will have to discover by itself and on the basis of its own experiences (also because media change, after McLuhan's death, has continued to demonstrate the importance of his concepts), and the same time an anti-classical thinker, one of the very first who have historicised and de-idealized the idea of text that has been and still is central in the tradition of our written heritage.