'The Medium Is the Massage' Mcluhan

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,

Marshall McLuhan believes that the media is changing our society. He thinks that because of the media and the advancements in technology we are re-tribalizing, involuntarily getting rid of individuals. We once only had books and reading was an individual activity. Books were read line-by-line, things happening one at a time, but as technology develops things are happening all at once. Our world is becoming smaller, connected through the media and technology. When something happens in the world we all get the message. He believes that the western world is becoming more group oriented like the third world countries. The media changes the way we see, feel, hear and touch our world, it works to our senses. McLuhan also believes that the medium is the message. He thinks that the way a message is delivered is more important than the message itself. Another theory of McLuhan’s is that “if it works it’s obsolete”. The meaning of this statement is that once an object satisfies the needs of customers it is replaced by something new. I agree with Marshall McLuhan, media has changed our world.

Marshall McLuhan was a media and communication theorist and “is considered the first leading prophet of the electronic age but he was also the most controversial and most talked-about contemporary intellectuals.”, he coined the phrase “Medium is the Message” also know as Medium Theory. He was explaining the way in which we absorb information from media, and how it isn’t the information that affects us but the way we absorb it. McLuhan said “Indeed, it is only too typical that the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” Medium Theory is his most famous piece of work, Medium

(Gordon 527-534) Explanation of quote 2: In this great example of metaphor what McLuhan defined media is that it is the extension of human psychic or physical faculty of human and that is true. The message inside that media always has a pair to work with. He proves that statement by giving an example of the telegraph and how telegraph contains the printed word, which contains writing, which contains speech and that is their relationship to each other. Furthermore, he all means that if we want to dig deeper, we must think deeper to understand the media and its contents.

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.

Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” I don’t believe that the media of production is indistinguishable to the message because the content still exists as a separate entity to that of its form, however I agree to some extent with McLuhan’s proposed idea that the medium is of equal importance to the message being communicated.

2. According to Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business” (Postman, Chapter 4 Page # 63 ,). Today as we have entered into that age with the Internet it can grab attention because it is entertaining and overloading the public with information so they will be involved. However, we are choosing sound bytes or entertainment over “actual knowledge” and forgetting it quickly and on to the next big story. This is the “now this” effect that Postman discussed, “ of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may

Marshall McLuhan was a media and communication theorist and “is considered the first leading prophet of the electronic age but he was also the most controversial and most talked-about contemporary intellectuals.”, he coined the phrase “Medium is the Message” also know as Medium Theory. He was explaining the way in which we absorb information from media, and how it isn’t the information that affects us but the way we absorb it. McLuhan said “Indeed, it is only too typical that the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” Medium Theory is his most famous piece of work, Medium Theory was introduced in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’’. Which soon became known as the bible of media studies. It is defined as “the name assigned to a variety of approaches used to examine how the means of expression of human communication impact the meaning(s) of human

In contrast Marshall McLuhan described how he believed that medium is literally the message. "The Medium" is a theory made by McLuhan himself as he expressed that a medium is any augmentation of ourselves. If McLuhan was a live today he would considered the social media as a median. The message, McLuhan clarifies, is the change that is brought into human social life. Along these lines, the medium is the message, as per McLuhan, implies that the aftereffects of an adjustment in human culture is brought about by a recently presented innovation. McLuhan keeps on indicating out that society ought not get to be occupied by the substance, which is not the same as the

Marshall McLuhan in the ‘Medium is the Massage’ prescribes that the growth of technology has reshaped Western society which subsequently effects the environment and an individual’s identity. Ian Bogost explores this technologically driven and progressive state of Western society which has fully domesticated us in the article ‘Future Ennui’. This has placed society in a state of ‘future ennui’ (Bogost, Ian. 2014) where people are disconnected from the natural world. It leaves the world empty in meaning which disrupts our authentic identity and truth of existence. Therefore it relegates that this mode of living in society needs to change. I will communicate this through fashion as a medium which constructs the ideal individual in society by

In The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, he explores new media in its most original, basic and pure way as an object, furthermore, he use the idea of the medium itself carries the message rather than the message, furthermore, to analyze how new media influence in the society. At the end, McLuhan explain the role of broadcast television (as a new medium) and how television itself become a “fixed charge” in people’s day-to-day living which we simply cannot live without it. (Marshall McLuhan 1962, p.209) Base on Mcluhan’s notion of how a medium formed in the past, if the idea still apply to the mass communication media nowaday as the media themselves shape the society regardless of the content it carries, or there is a new relation

“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

Marshall McLuhan believed that the medium through which a message is received played a vital role in its effect on society and individuals, and should be studied in hand with the content it is carrying. He was one of the first writers to bring forth attention to the presence of communication tools, “...their characteristics, and how they work, rather than just to the messages these technologies transmitted” (Tremblay, 2012). In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man he wrote that a medium is an extension of ourselves.

What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message? by Mark Federman Former Chief Strategist McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7) Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, "The