The Medium is the Message

SOURCE: http://www.slideshare.net/annejo83/week-13-the-medium-is-the-message

Many scholarly articles have been written to give interpretation on Marshall McLuhan’s "The Medium is the Message.”

The Medium is the Massage was written in 1967, and in it, McLuhan confers writing, voice, and “electric” media, especially television, and their impacts on individuals, society and cognition (McLuhan).

Here is the video of Marshall McLuhan's full lecture about the "Medium is the Message" on ABC last June 27, 1977:

SOURCE:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw

Born in 1911 and passed away in 1980,  McLuhan had no opportunity to understand and experience the Web the way we are familiar with it today, but that never cease him from exerting a magnified influence on it.  It was McLuhan who first conveyed about communication and technology having the capacity to form a “global village.” As a primary educator and pioneered the study of communication and its evolution over time, McLuhan popularized a lot of observations about the effect of new forms of media and expression.  Most prominent to note, McLuhan’s expression “The medium is the message” has had a resounding effect not just on Web design but on mass media generally (Gross, 2011)

Amongst the divergent of interpretation of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message”, one glaring perception that has a strong resonance with electronic communication is the one from Visible Artifacts (Summary: The medium is the message, 2008).

The website deciphered that McLuhan is strongly reiterating the participatory role of information technology (essentially electronic communication) in some instances, and its mass media broadcast duty in others (McLuhan).

• Electronic communication technology curtails distance by lessening the time it takes to talk amongst people and thus weakens social barriers.  McLuhan is believed to have contrived the term “global village,” (McLuhan) that could mean this is both in the sense of “it takes a village to raise a child” (p. 13); and in the sense of community (p. 10): electronic data storage and communication lets people to approach information that their family, peers and locality don’t have.
• Various media use our sense of sight, touch, sound, smell, (taste?) in several ways, and this in return impacts the way we think and perceive the world, which in turn impacts the environment we create for ourselves.  That is the “massage” in the title.
• The environment we breathe in is not visible to us, ingrained in it as we are.  One value of art is to draw our thinking to the world we live in.
• Rowdy technologies can be mystifying to a settled environment.  People try to utilise the new technologies to stay doing what they have done with the old one (p. 74) (single loop) while not perceiving that the new tech essentially alters what can be done (double loop).
• New media highlights a holistic instead of reductionistic mean of living: roles over goals.
• The printing press helped transverse individualism in means that the oral tradition (bards) or the copied book (copied by monks) could not. Printing technology formed copyright, and electronic media may alter how that is devised.  He says that the perception of copyright derive with the onset of printing technology (p. 122), because the effort of duplicating texts was so strong that there was no readership by public, no commercial aspect, and  no public texts were shared amongst a small group of scholars.  Printing technology developed public readership, and instantly you could sell your books.  Battling piracy became significant, and thus copyright.  McLuha starts to consider the impact of cheap copying (Xeroxing) on copyright and how it turns easier to get around it (p. 123).

To summarize, allow me to have McLuhan explain himself through his own words:

"When I say the medium is the message, I'm saying that the motor

car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the factories,

and the oil companies. That is the medium. In other words, the

medium of the car is the effects of the car. When you pull the

effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as an

engineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The

car is a FIGURE in a GROUND of services. It's when you change

the GROUND that you change the car. The car does not operate as

the medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the medium.

So 'the medium is the message' is not a simple remark, and I've

always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden

environment of services created by an innovation, and the hidden

environment of services is the thing that changes people. *It

is the environment that changes people, not the technology*."

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

(2003).

  FURTHER READINGS:

http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html

http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/N/N80/V80/00A_Strate_V80.pdf

https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=jw16AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=the+medium+is+the+massage+in+electronic+communication&source=bl&ots=cmfXr5f2vN&sig=xli-GE6Fu_xjrytdsRDiPhFYzZ4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAzgKahUKEwiputfX08TIAhXLoZQKHdFBAS8#v=onepage&q=the%20medium%20is%20the%20massage%20in%20electronic%20communication&f=false

REFERENCES

Gross, J. (4 July, 2011). The Medium Is The Message. Retrieved 16 October, 2015, from Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/201107/the-medium-is-the-message/

McLuhan, M. (n.d.). wikipedia.org. Retrieved 16 October, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Summary: The medium is the message. (21 September, 2008). Retrieved 16 October, 2015, from Visible Artifacts: http://visual.placodermi.org/2008/09/21/the-medium-is-the-massage/