'The Medium Is the Massage' Mcluhan

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

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.

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

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,

This book is about Medium as a Metaphor, that means that we should not believe that everything is as it may seem, that everything states for something. It is the history of Message and the ways of transmitting it from the beginnings until now days, from smoke signals and wall drawings until the modern technologies that Media uses now days. I found it full of information presented in the funniest way.

The Public Occurences was the first ingenuous attempt to report news to the public. This informed people on current issues, enabling them to form their own opinions about politics. Since 1690, the media’s approach to reporting news stories has shifted. Instead of offering people the truth, forms of media like television often distort political affairs to align with their own political agendas. With the shift in the media’s tactics of tackling current events, the public’s perception of the media has transformed. Back in 1690, any form of media was a blessing because it kept the public cognizant. Today, people take for granted a constant flow of information because it is so readily available. Overall, the incessant and

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

There is a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that the media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there is actually a unitary ‘public.’

People like to be informed. According to Nielsen’s Q4 report in 2012, Americans have a voracious appetite for content, spending an average of 41 hours per week engaging with it across different screens. For the consumer, it’s about being entertained and staying informed [1]. The onset of the internet has revolutionized the news business in several ways, making an impact in society; 50% of the public now cites the internet as a main source for news, percentage that will increase in the next years since 71% of younger Americans cite the internet as a main news source [2, 3].

This concept is additive to my overall knowledge of communication and mirrors my worldview on this topic. This reading mirrors what was taught in class.

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