Meaning the Medium Is the Message

The article “The Medium is the Message” focuses on Marshall McCluhan’s personal standpoint of the media using technology and how it can affect our everyday lives. He believes the medium “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and actions” (McCluhan 2). This explains his idea of the media forming and controlling an individual’s action and identity in society. The medium is becoming a powerful instrument that persuades, influences, and controls how we think or observe the world. For example, television has an audience of over a billion people, who most likely spends over four hours a day walking different programs. There are positive effects that includes gaining education and knowledge about specific topics like politics,

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

Advances in technology has altered the world as we know it, and it can only progress farther. Through the minds of many intelligent and devoted individuals across time technology has developed into a twenty first century deity. A young child one hundred years ago could never envision a world like ours today, ruled by ones and zeros. The media has affected us in ways that we can’t even comprehend and will continue to steadily provide humans with a faster and faster flow of information for years to come. But what is the cost to have all of the information you can imagine at your fingertips? The exponential increase in information that we process in all forms of media is affecting the way that we live by making society more alienated.

With the advent of information technology, the ways different aspects of life work and operate have changed a great deal. Media has always had a great influence in molding the culture of a society. There was a point of time when television and radio were invented and when computer was invented and there was little connection between the two. Time then travelled fast then through the age of cassettes, records, VCDs, DVDs, flash drive and then the internet. Media also started to go satellite on a massive scale and there came a point of time when media and digital communication systems became closely integrated with one another, opening the dimensions to digital media.

When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” back in 1967, we were facing a very different society than we are today. His focus was of course on the mediums of the time: radio, newsprint and television. Mark Federman, a Chief Strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology asserts in his article, What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? (2004), McLuhan was not speaking directly about the medium itself. His thought process went to a deeper level. Federman “note[s] that it is not the content or use of innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it” that is the issue. In a world that we can now access hundreds of thousands of bits of information in milliseconds, we can certainly see a shift in media influence. Today we can actually watch events as they unfold, whether they are events for a greater good or events of horrific acts of terrorism, technology has enabled society to be omnipresent. Melody Thompson (2011) refers to Jaron Lanier in discussing how technology shapes our relationship to itself. She notes that Lanier believes technology imposes on us its own viewpoint and that shapes our decisions. In a world where we live with a 24 hour news cycle and news stations that can skew their reporting to send the message they want their viewers to hear, it is quite prophetic when Lanier states “it

Marshall McLuhan’s phrase is meant to convey the fact that it’s the medium itself that is important, not what the medium may produce. Anyone may have a piece of print in their hands, and it doesn’t matter what they’re actually reading, the fact they have a piece of print is important. The evolution of technology has allowed multiple mediums of communication to br brought into the world. These various mediums of communication; newspapers, phones, radio, televisions, and computers, are so important for the world.

Neil Postman deeply believed that the medium inevitably gives off a strong hold on the messages that it communicates. A medium as Postman explains to the reader, is to technology as the mind is to the brain. In this sense technology is viewed as a mechanism. The medium is viewed as the social and intelligent world made by the mechanism. Postman argues that the formation of public discourse even if that form is mainly obtained through the technology of newspapers, books, etc. or electronically through television or the radio, will impact the ideas that we perceive and formulate daily.

1.) Of this week’s reading the articles, The Medium is the Metaphor the author and Media as epistemology by Neil Postman draw on the fact that present American culture is entirely devoted to entertainment and today’s media-metaphor shift has led much of our public discourse to become nonsense when it does not sever its sole purpose to entertain. Postman also went on to explain on what he means by the term epistemology with the help of some words from epistemology.

McLuhan’s claim that “The Medium is the Message” signifies that the approach of a transmitted message does matter. The reason as to why is that it affects how it is obtained by recipients which can manipulate their overall perception. This dominant form of communication also influences the substance in modifying how we interact and behave alongside our values and norms. These effects happen to stem from numerous definitions of media and its content for users such as hot (filled with information lacking in participation to think and active engagement furthering passive behavior) and cold (short of data requiring mental activity to be involved) media. Ultimately, this assertion pinpoints the role of media ecology in that mass media is the sole foundation of cultural life in society.

Throughout the text, Carr occasionally references Marshall McLuhan’s ideology stating that, “The medium is the message” (Carr

Godin first begins his blog by stating examples of how the media has been declining. He states that it is important to realize that our best-selling novels have been replaced by coloring books. Cable channels like TLC and the History Channel show populist, non-educational shows. Not only that, but even newspapers inform their audience with information they do not care to hear. This has resulted in the increase of general population not even purchasing newspapers. Seth Godin goes on to inform the reader that the decline of thoughtful media has been discussed for a century stating that the decrease is not anything new. The new information is, “A fundamental shift not just in the profit-seeking gatekeepers, but in the culture as a whole.” This shows the readers that Godin has done his research. It also shows that he is passionate about the lack of depth and complexity in our modern communications. The readers start to build trust in what he wrote because of his strong illustrations about the topic.

In the television profile “This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage,” Allan Kaprow says “[McLuhan’s] talking about goggles…Everybody has a set of goggles… yours is a private idiosyncratic set of goggles and suppose that the generation before has a different set of goggles and you both think you are looking at the same thing and you are not” (12:12). This is an interesting point as it further complicates McLuhan’s arguments not only is the way a person receives information (the medium) going to impact (massage) the person, but the lenses or goggles the person has is going to impact the way the person is massaged by the medium as well. Perhaps it is the cumulative experience with the medium that plays a role in determining how the person perceives the message of the medium and how that message will impact upon them, as Postman’s son suggests in his introduction to his father’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which Postman claims that current college students struggle to criticize modern technology and mediums because they grew up with them and thus influenced the formation of their

“The medium is the message,” uttered by the late media scholar and theorist Marshall McLuhan, and they have been revered and dissected ever since they were spoken. There has been several different interpretations on the premise of McLuhan’s words, and the meaning behind them. The best way to start unraveling his theory, is to get a general understanding of the terms used in his famous quote. In McLuhan’s own words, a medium is simply “an extension of ourselves.” Simply put the medium personifies or enhances what we as humans cannot do on our own. In a mass media perspective this means the use of technology including radio, television, and the Internet to project our thoughts, feelings, and senses (Frederman) . Finally, it is important to

In Judy Frank’s book, “Media: From Chaos to Clarity”, Franks breaks down the constant changing media world into easy to understand concepts. Before jumping straight into the chaos, Frank takes time to explain the past roles of media and how it functioned. Everything had its place and there was no ‘open circuits’, as she calls it.

Certain media theorists such as Sherry Turkle do an incredible job on studying these properties of technology and their bearing on us, but sometimes seem to dwell on the negative side of the analysis. In short some of these media theorists do astonishing work studying the impact socially that using and communicating through modern technology has, but then takes a negative stance due to their archaic understanding of what is capable with these technologies. We have come so far in the past years in advancing humanity and its natural predicaments while being heavily reliant on technology to communicate. Not noting that advancement is pessimistic and