What is the message of McLuhan's medium?

[coberst]

What is the message of McLuhan’s medium?

 

“The Medium is The Message” is the phrase that made Marshall McLuhan famous. It is a phrase most of us, young and old, have heard. Until a few months ago it was a phrase that confounded me.

 

Let’s get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.

 

“The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power.”

 

“The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium.”

 

“All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages.”

 

Consider the invention of the printing press and the introduction of books to the society. A book communicates a message. Many books communicate many messages. ‘The book’ communicates the same message to everyone who comes into contact with the book. The book transmits the same message to everyone while many books transmit many different messages to many different people.

 

Evolution moves very slowly. We adapt to our environment very slowly. We survive because we do adapt. When we change more quickly than we can adapt we face problems that we have not had the time to make the kind of adjustments necessary.

 

The habits we acquire determine our state of mind. Our changing habits are part of this process of adaptation to our environment. Do not think of environment as being just the quality of our air or water but it is a broad term signifying the world we live in.

 

So we have changed very dramatically our habits that were part of us when we knew little and understood much. I am speaking relatively here. What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change? I do not know but I only point to the fact as worth consideration.

 

Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another. Think for a minute if instead of sitting and watching TV we were physically escorted done a hallway with many doors. Then we open a door and are physically placed into this world we see on TV. Our reaction would be very different. In other words we are creatures prepared for a certain world that no longer exists. This is the definition of a forthcoming extinction if we think about the meaning of evolution.

[Buffy]

McLuhan is normally interpreted within the context of his times, when there was great sensitivity to the impact of this new medium. It is easy to be much more jaded about these traditional interpretations given the rapid advance of the "new media": its no longer fear that is driving it (altough we do have occasional cultural hickups like parental paranoia about MySpace).

 

What's really cool about him though is that you can go back and re-read him and find that:

 

1) His warnings were not about the advance of media per se, but how those media are used by forces in power

2) His sense of humor is so wry, that his arguments go right over the heads of most people who quote him (and I'm not necessarily putting you in this category coberst!)

 

What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change?

McLuhan's warning was very much about the fact that the *novelty* of the medium can be used for nefarious, or at least wasteful purposes (cf. "90% of everything is crap"), so we should beware.

Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another.

This is not that new--I'd strongly recommend Sergei Eisenstein's essays on film editing, but arguably, this technique is as old as the Greek Tragedy.

 

McLuhan changed his phrase to "The Medium is the Massage" http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Massage-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1584230703/ which probably comes closer to what he meant. How you respond to meaning depends on how its delivered. Novelty makes you more receptive. In that book he points to lots of examples from our past mediums that point out their revolutionary and civilization-changing nature. James Joyce was quite a radical!

 

Its really amazing to go back and read this stuff in light of our "newer new media"...

 

When the individual feels, the community reels, :evil:

Buffy

[coberst]

Buffy says—“1) His warnings were not about the advance of media per se, but how those media are used by forces in power

2) His sense of humor is so wry, that his arguments go right over the heads of most people who quote him (and I'm not necessarily putting you in this category coberst!)

 

I have put in a good bit of time reading his book “Understanding Media” and I must admit that I have to read and reread him to comprehend his meaning. I never got the impression that he was making warnings about “how those media are used by forces in power”.

 

I always got the impression that he was explaining just how all technology affects us because all technology is essentially an extension of our self and as such it had great effects on our habits and thus our attitudes and behavior. I was much impressed by what I considered to be very unusually unique insights.

 

As I comprehend him he is trying to show us that the message is the technology it self. It is the technology, which is an extension of our self that has such a profound effect upon us without our comprehension.

[Buffy]

Well to quote McLuhan himself (from "Annie Hall"): "You know nothing of my work, and how you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

 

McLuhan had quite a bit to say about this, and it comes out in his public statements and minor works that the books. Here's a quote from his interview in Playboy:

TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it's creating a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician. Castro is a good example of the new tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback; he governs his country on camera, by giving the Cuban people the experience of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Castro's adroit blend of political education, propaganda and avuncular guidance is the pattern for tribal chieftains in other countries. The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image--like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.

 

I would recommend "The Medium is the Massage", but be prepared for understanding why he was such a Joyce fan (as am I)....

 

Shun the Punman! :)

Buffy