McLuhan's Message
Marshall
McLuhan is a name I have come across many a time in my academic career, often
mentioned briefly by a teacher or glanced over in a textbook. To me, his
legacy was reducible to a handful of enduring catch-phrases, and it was not
until being presented with the options for this very assignment that I felt
compelled to finally confront my ignorance concerning this revered mind and in
particular the expression for which he is best known, “the medium is the message.”
This
phrase, while appealing in its concise and alliterative structure, is quite an
enigma. How could the medium be the message if the purpose of the medium is to
provide the message? During a 1979 televised lecture, McLuhan was proposed a similar question by an audience
member:
“If
the medium is the message, and it doesn’t matter what we say on T.V, why are we
all here tonight and why am I
asking this question?”
In his
response he explained…
“…there
is a huge technology involved in T.V which surrounds you physically, and the
effect of that huge surface
environment on you personally is vast. The effect of the program is
incidental.”
In other
words, the effect of content in and of itself is dwarfed by the influence of
its medium, namely the method and rate with which it is delivered. This notion
is perhaps best epitomized in McLuhans 1964 book Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, where he illustrates the dynamic that exists between
content and medium through the context of transportation, specifically the
development of the railways:
"…it
accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating
totally new kinds of cities and new
kinds of work and leisure." -excerpt taken from his official website.
In this
case the railway, being the medium of transportation propelled civilization to realm
of heightened existence; an undoubtedly important advance that had very little
to do with the contents of the train. Such is the case with media, where the information,
while infinite in its possibilities, is used simply as a currency to satisfy
basic communicatory processes, while the medium of transmission determines how
it is consumed, in ways much more significant than the obvious physical
manifestation. For instance, the simple act of reading as opposed can have a
profound impact, stimulating processes of the mind that may otherwise be left idle.
In the same lecture, Mcluhan stressed this point, explaining that because of
the amount of meanings that can be attributed to any word, a reader must rapidly
select a meaning that is most appropriate given the context of surrounding
words, and thus literate people tend to be better at making decisions. Moreover,
the medium also dictates how many people can have access to information. In
fact, prior to the advent of mediums of mass communication, there is little
indication that a ‘Global Event” could or did exist. In an article for Smashing
Magazine, contributor Jason Gross made this very point,
“Today,
we often cite various events as things that will “change the world,” but 100
years ago the entire world was not
reachable.”
Now that the world is so reachable, McLuhan's ideas are more valuble than ever, and more available. I just don't know which medium to choose.
