Draft:Marshal McLuhan, The Medium is the Message

• Comment: please consider expanding the existing article Nthep (talk) 20:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

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Background: Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (/məˈkluːən/, mə-KLOO-ən; July 22, 1912 – December 30, 1981) was a Canadian philosopher and scientist whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory.He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of History at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the “Papa of media studies". McLuhan created the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Woman and the term global city. He predicted the Internet almost 50 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1950s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1960s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives. Theory: McLuhan uses the term "message" to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium shades us of the meaning of the medium". For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and character of human association and action". Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative patterns and structure". Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "linear connections" to "configurations." Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the "content of any medium is always another medium" – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph. McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message", changing it to "mass age", "mess age" and "massage". A later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Massages, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error. Concerning the title, McLuhan wrote: The title "The Medium Is the Massage" is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There's a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, 'Help Beautify Junkyards. Toss Something Lovely Away Today.' This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title". McLuhan argues that a "message" is, "the alteration of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into people's affairs". McLuhan understood "medium" as a medium of communication in the broadest sense. In Understanding Media he wrote: "The instance of the electric shine may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric shine is just information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal word or name."The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of "the medium is the message": a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during darkness that would otherwise be enveloped by night. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its pure presence". Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (the content), and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner. In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us solid information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of. On the subject of art history, McLuhan interpreted Cubism as announcing clearly that the medium is the message. For him, Cubist art required "instant sensory awareness of the entity" rather than perspective alone. In other words, with Cubism one could not ask what the artwork was about (content), but rather consider it in its entirety. Many of the conceptions presented in this work are expansions, popularizations and applications of ideas initially conceived by Walter Benjamin and the dialog between his texts and other thinkers in the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s.

References

Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. Basic Books, 1997. Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. MIT Press, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964. Federman, Mark. "What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?" McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. McLuhan, Eric. Theories of Communication. University of Toronto Press, 1989. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. Routledge, 1999. Logan, Robert K. Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. Peter Lang, 2010. 8-22. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Various passages.