Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message
Today I noticed the Google Doodle illustrated the 106th birthday of Marshall McLuhan. https://www.google.com/doodles/marshall-mcluhans-106th-birthday
If you don't know who McLuhan was, the terms "Global village" and "The medium is the message" are some of his famous quotes, and he predicted the world wide web 30 years before its inception. In other words, he was WAY ahead of his time - a man with future oriented antennae.
As a young man, his desire to "gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty" lead him from religion to literature and agnosticism and this was a springboard for his later thinking.
Although his work was controversial for its time, and perhaps still is today, he contributed much to modern understanding of media and how it effects society and culture, with ideas such as hot and cool media, "the medium is the message" as well as studying the effects of various media on human senses.
In this post I'll briefly discuss some of McLuhan's major models.
This figure, McLuhans tetrad, illustrates his way of analysing media:
What does it amplify, enhance or intensify? Which senses does the media act on?
What does it make obsolete? Which senses does the media neglect?
What does it recover/retrieve that was lost to other media? Is it bringing text or audio back?
What happens when the media is pushed to the extreme and "flips"? What reactions are there due to heavy reliance on media with a particular emphasis?
The medium is the message is one of McLuhan's central concepts in which is argues that media should be studied and understood in terms of the effects of the media rather than the content contained within the media. For example, the effect of video games rather than violence within video games. Media creates the environment and content is conveyed through the environment. How we receive the content is the same, regardless of the content. He also emphasised the need to study media in the context of society - if a new media is created, its effect is dependent on what media already exists as well as other contextual parameters in society.
Question to readers: How is Steemit emphasising or deemphasising parts of the way human's interact with the universe and receive information?
Hot and Cool media is a continuum McLuhan used to describe media and its effect on user involvement. Hot media was described as that which requires minimal effort to find meaning in and a high level of involvement. Hot media usually stimulates particular senses with high definition and tends to be more passive.
In contrast, cool media is that which requires more active participation to find meaning. They provide comparatively little involvement and require more effort for full comprehension.
In McLuhans 1960's book, Understanding Media, he described media as the "extensions of man". Of course, what he probably meant was "the extensions of humans," women not precluded. And he was right, the environment our nervous systems occupy is bigger than it has ever been. Cyberspace is an example of that.
McLuhan also says that media, the extensions of humans also leads to amputations. When one media is relied on to extend our nervous systems, it is accompanied with an amputation, part of our humanness being minimized or subordinated to the technology. He reminds us to use the tools of media at our own peril. A warning that is becoming ever more pertinent.
Our means of communication has changed drastically since his book was written. He foresaw the internet! In some respects, we are more connected than ever. Our voices can now extend across the globe at the speed of light, all without activating our larynx or giving a smile.
Smiles :)
Picture sources: 1: Wikipedia commons, 2: Wikipedia commons, 3. Author's photo