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Sat 28 Oct, 2006 04:19 am
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 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."
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.
As I understand it, coberst, the media is the massage:
Marshall McLuhan - WWW Prophet
When Marshall McLuhan wrote these words in 1963, the World Wide Web lay far in the future.
"By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth, will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. We must serve our electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which we once served our coracle, our canoe, our typography, and all other extensions of our physical organs. But, there is a difference here. Those previous technologies were partial and fragmentary. The electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is now possible to store and to translate everything; and as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier." Mcluhan, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man, 1963.
He was indeed a prophet.
Coberst wrote: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.
One small point: that last sentence is especially contentious (and can easily be falsified by taking a peak at the Spirituality & Religion thread and observing the different interpretations of the Bible). When studying "messages," it is important to identify not only what message is sent but also what message is received. It is the latter rather than the former that forms the stuff of history.
Shapeless wrote:Coberst wrote: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.
One small point: that last sentence is especially contentious (and can easily be falsified by taking a peak at the Spirituality & Religion thread and observing the different interpretations of the Bible). When studying "messages," it is important to identify not only what message is sent but also what message is received. It is the latter rather than the former that forms the stuff of history.
The act of reading books is far more important in defining the habits of a population than is the content of a book. The fact that books exist and are read by people has a great effect on the habits and thus the attitudes and thus the behavior of people.
Precisely, though I would go further and say that it is the act of interpretation more than the act of reading that gives someone a glimpse into "the habits of a population." (Or, to put it another way, to read is to interpret.) As you are suggesting in your other thread, even stating what the "content" of a book is is often a very messy and complicated job indeed.
Shapeless wrote:Precisely, though I would go further and say that it is the act of interpretation more than the act of reading that gives someone a glimpse into "the habits of a population." (Or, to put it another way, to read is to interpret.) As you are suggesting in your other thread, even stating what the "content" of a book is is often a very messy and complicated job indeed.
I have a difficult time explaining McLuhan's meaning. If you have not read him I think it is well worth the effort. But he would disagree with your contention and I would also after reading his book. What he says is so contrary to common sense thought that a person has a problem getting alligned with his world. Reading McLuhn for the first time is like reading myth for the first time.
I'll take a look at MacLuhan some time, though I don't see anything in what you or Letty quoted that seems contradictory to my assertiont about reading and interpretation. But I'll look. MacLuhan or no, one needn't look very far to test my assertion. I would again invite you simply to look at, say, the history of religion and ask yourself whether that history been determined more by the reading of what is printed in religious texts, or the interpretation of those texts. (Or whether you can meaningfully seperate the two.)
Shapeless, as I recall, a book is considered by McLuhan to be one part of the media and is portable. The best things that I got from his interpretation are inventions. This information is from the memory of having taught him, but I recall his observation that man invents, and then his inventions control him.
ex. The computer is an extension of the brain; the hammer is an extension of the hand, etc. How true, and consider the cell phone of today.
Also, he cited that young people don't interpret the world as we do a book, i.e. reading from left to right, a rather fixed observation, but can do many things at one time, (multi-tasking) and I for one, have observed that and accepted it as a justifiable thesis.
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