The medium is the message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The medium is the message is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.[1] McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

For example, McLuhan claimed in Understanding Media that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual's understanding of it. Some media, like movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot" (intensifying one single sense) and "high definition" (demanding a viewer's attention), and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition" (requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value).[2] This concentration on the medium and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of "the medium is the message."

More controversially, McLuhan postulated that specific content might have little effect on society. For example, it does not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming—the effect of television on society would be identical, and profound.

McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[3] Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself—the content—and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[4]

Hence in Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.[5] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time.[4] As the society's values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions[4] that we are not aware of.

McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message" changing it to "mass age", "mess age", and "massage"; a later book, The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Quentin Fiore,[6] was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title which is said to have been a printing error.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Originally published in 1964 by Mentor, New York; reissued 1994, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts with an introduction by Lewis Lapham
  2. ^ Understanding Media, p. 22.
  3. ^ Understanding Media, p. 8.
  4. ^ a b c Federman, M. (2004, July 23). What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? Retrieved <Oct 9, 2008> from http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm .
  5. ^ McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media, Routledge, London
  6. ^ The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967, New York:Bantam

[edit] External links

  • MediaTropes eJournal A scholarly journal, Vol. 1, Marshall McLuhan's "Medium is the Message": Information Literacy in a Multimedia Age

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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