When I signed up to read and present on the section titled “The Typewriter” in McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I had not yet glanced at the table of contents, let alone the chapter in question. I chose it because it sounded like, of the options given, it might have the most to do with literature, and I’m a literary studies graduate student (i.e. major book worm). Happily, in expounding on the social and cultural effects of the rise of the typewriter as a technological medium, McLuhan name drops Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings (one of my major research interests is modernist poetry– I was pumped).

In the Introduction, McLuhan defines media as “extensions of man” (6). The quote Joe succinctly cited from this point in the book helped me keep McLuhan’s intent for the book in mind from that point on. “The Typewriter” begins with an illustration of what McLuhan points to in the first chapter of the book, which is the fact that the content of any given medium is another medium (18). When Henry James dictates his novel to his secretary, it is clear that the novel (one form of media) contains speech (also a form of media). The typewriter served as the “expediter” and as such, it “brought writing and speech and publication into close association” (262). The above-mentioned poets used the typewriter to push their experiments in verse in ways that could not have been reproduced with any other available media. Eliot and Pound made the typewriter into “an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime” while cummings used it “like a public-address system immediately at hand” to “shout or whisper or whistle, and make funny typographic faces at the audience” (262, 260).

Today, of course, the typewriter is a totally out-of-date medium for communication. My father-in-law, who I believe was the last hold out in the country, recently made the switch to computerized files at his small business, and the only time I remember using a typewriter was for fun as a child when my parents took it out to do their taxes. Vintage typewriters might be prized by nostalgic writers as the ultimate tool for putting words to the page, but what makes them special now? Can a laptop/tablet/smartphone/etc. do everything a typewriter could? Could a high-tech poet today achieve the effects Eliot, Pound, and cummings created on the typewriter, or is something lost (changed? gained?)?