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Tue 8 Nov, 2005 11:53 am
"So an attitude is caused when we think about something the same way over and over until it becomes automatic. The resulting actions in response to the thought also become automatic. Change the habit of thought and you change the attitude. Change the attitude and you change the resulting action."
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"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 days 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 technologyÂ…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."
Here the alphabet is the medium and the message of that medium animated the attitudes of Western man thereby changing the action of all Western generations that followed.
These later quotations are taken from McLuhan's "Understanding Media".
But what, exactly, is the message of the medium?
McLuhan certainly loves technology. I understand that mediums can change our habits and thus change us, and that that change is itself a message. I don't buy, though, the thought that that change that has occurred is necessarily the message. It is a message. We are changed by more things than just new mediums technologies. Also, the mediums themselves don't communicate the significance of their effects on us. We communicate the significance of the mediums' effects on us. Mediums, as their very name implies, are merely conveyances, middle positions. Middle positions are important, but not more important that the things they are conveying.
The very first medium that homo sapiens communicated in, linguistically, was air. Air itself has nothing to say.
InfraBlue
You gotta think about it for a little while.
No that cannot be right that, "The Medium is The Message." The message will always be the message and its effect will lie not in the medium in which it is delivered but in the message itself or you'd have to agree that you can fire someone or promote or reward or punish and there is a chance that it won't be felt. That is not true, the effect will always be the same. I think the quote by Marshall McLuhan is applicable but only under special circumstances - situations that are not extreme. In those situations, one can take the severity or lightness away in the way the message is delivered. And the message may seem phony if the person acts suspiciously or real if the person is a good actor.
Beena
The reading of a book sends a message. The reading of a hundred books sends a hundred messages all of them a different message. The reading of a gillion books send a gillion different messages across the land but the act of reading the gillion books sends a gillion messages each one the same message. A gillion "reading books" messages. Book is a beach with individual books being the grains of sand on that beach.
Coberst, I don't need to read that book by McLuhan to understand the meaning of the phrase, "The medium is the message,' because it's clear just by itself. It means that together with the message, how the message is delivered makes a difference to the message too. Or in other words, the medium of delivery and the message both are important. Now, how does your beach and the sand analogy fit in here? I know it seems nice, reads nice and feels nice, but with the context above, it doesn't fit. So what is the point of bringing that analogy here? Anyway, I rest my case. My point was that the medium of delivering a message is important too, but in extreme situations it would become null and void. Or in other words, if my pet died, it would make no difference how the message was delivered to me, the effect would be the same.
Beena
I have run out of words. You will have to read the book as they say.
You're right, I have to read the book because it seems that Marshall McLuhan is trying to convey the message that in delivering the message, the medium takes such predominance today that it itself is becoming the message.
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