In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan argues that the medium with which a message is sent is itself another message; he claims that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.” To McLuhan, “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”.
https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/comm385-sp19/2019/01/28/the-medium-is-the-message/
Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” was defined as such “because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and interaction”. In his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan establishes the concept of “medium” as an extension of man and “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs”. McLuhan uses mechanical automation and its impact on our roles in industry and society to address this concept - looking at how automation impacted societal relationships. He also focuses on the “messages” of the electric light and railways; that is, how they changed human interaction. The same could be said for accessing information through more conventional ideas of media such as TV, radio or the web. Instead of simply focusing on what is being said through each medium, McLuhan’s concept requires us to look at what each is saying about society.
McLuhan believes “that it is the channel or technology of communication that shapes the content transmitted rather than vice versa. This is why, for McLuhan, the medium is the message, for information … can never be understood in isolation from the technological devices through which it is produced and communicated”
https://depaul.digication.com/key_terms_new_media_old_media/medium_is_the_message
One of the greatest myths about media is that they are neutral, i.e. they are mere “pipes” or “conduits” by which information is passed from one individual to one or more people.
The truth of the matter is that technologies are NOT neutral with regard to its effects on individual and social cognition. Different technologies (or media) engender different mind-sets or ways of thinking these characteristics are inherent in the nature of the media itself and, thus, often invisible to the users of these media. As McLuhan famously said “The Medium IS the Message.”
The effects of particular technologies on cognition, knowledge, and society at large are often quite subtle and complexly woven. Strict cause-effect relationships may not be apparent. Moreover, these effects are often not immediately appreciated but, rather, show their influence on far longer time scales–decades or maybe even hundreds of years.
A fruitful way of thinking about the manner in which media influence cognition is that different media prefigure cognitive processes and the development of cognitive structures in different ways. In its original usage in the theory of history, as described by Hayden White, a “prefigurative scheme” meant a set of implicit cognitive biases that determine the “ground rules,” so to speak, of cognitive processing and analysis (e.g., what kinds of data are important, how they should be evaluated, how arguments should be structured, and so on). White’s idea of prefiguration was that it is precognitive and precritical. He argued that prefiguration not only helped delimit the borders of a domain, but also helped determine how concepts will be used to identify the objects in the domain and the nature of the relationships between those objects. The important point, again, is that quite often these prefigurative schemes are invisible to the people employing them, but still affect their thinking in essential ways (much like the way the lenses of eyeglasses affect vision without their long-time users being aware at most times that they are looking through them).
An ancient argument of this kind can be found in Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, in which Socrates (actually Plato speaking through Socrates) makes the argument that writing (and books) would destroy thought. The crux of the argument is that books merely make statements; they do not argue back. Socrates claimed that this passivity would undermine reflective thought–the ability to think deeply about things, to question and examine every assertion. The crucial concern for Socrates was not what people would write but, rather, the effects of the print medium, itself, on the fundamental nature of thinking.
The technology of writing (and print that followed it) changed our view of the world. Writing today is so ubiquitous, so much a part of our world, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a solely oral culture or even to think of writing as a technology. Knowledge in oral cultures would be more fluid; it could change with every retelling.
Looking specifically at the invention of the printing press—arguably one of the most significant technological advances of human cultural evolution. It allowed for mass literacy, and in some ways, it can be argued that, our educational system is built around the “book.” The “book” and the ability it provided to inscribe and share ideas in a concrete form is what led to the renaissance, the reformation, the scientific revolution. By democratizing access to information and knowledge, the book, challenged authority, and popularized ideas such as “all men [sic] are created equal,’ or “man [sic] is born free, but he is everywhere in chains” leading to transformative social change, the impact of which we feel even today.
Most of the significant effects of the invention and spread of print can be traced to certain specific properties of print media: in particular, print created objects that were mobile, immutable, presentable, and readable; and these properties led to fundamental changes in how we think, both individually and collectively. These properties ensured (or seemed to ensure) that discussions could be carried beyond the conversational arena, that ideas could be transported without change in their essential nature, and that they could be universally and consistently understood (at least by those who knew the conventions) in a way that more mutable, “unreliable” oral retellings could not.
A few of the consequences of this transference of properties from the medium to the message were that it solidified the notion of ownership of ideas and the convention that arguments could be settled by invoking the appropriate text, that ideas could be “owned” and more. This is of course in sharp contrast to an oral culture, where meanings were deeply connected to speech, with no external arbitrator or authority. Thus, print, by its very nature, prefigured the manner in which discourse could be, and was, structured.
https://punyamishra.com/2022/08/09/unpacking-mcluhans-the-medium-is-the-message-1-3/
McLuhan uses the term 'message' to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium". For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and action". Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure". Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal connections" to "configurations". Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the "content of any medium is always another medium" – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.
McLuhan argues that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs".
McLuhan understood "medium" as a medium of communication in the broadest sense. In Understanding Media he wrote: "The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name." The light bulb is 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". 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.
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. 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. As 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 that we are not aware of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
Title: "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis." In it, McLuhan outlines how the myth of Narcissus staring at his own reflection in the water is much like us staring at a version of ourselves in our own devices, yet we don't always recognize it as such. Tablets definitely come to mind here, but so do selfies and social networks. If we're not vigilant, this can lead to a sense of oblivious numbness. In an interview with Playboy, McLuhan elaborates on this idea:
All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.
https://psmag.com/environment/medium-message-50-years-later-91552#.okvp4aymf
MEDIA ARE EXTENSIONS OF OURSELVES
McLuhan refers to media as “extensions of ourselves.” Remember, the subtitle of the book is Extensions of Man. To McLuhan, media is anything that extends human capabilities.
As he says, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the psychic and social complex.” In other words, any media extends our capabilities. In the process, it changes how we think, and how we interact with one another.
MEDIA CHANGES OUR “SENSE RATIOS”
Every medium alters what McLuhan calls “sense ratios.” We read a book with our eyes and mind. We watch television with our eyes and ears. The content of the medium comes to us through specific senses (sight, sound, touch, thought, etc.). That affects how we use our other senses.
Imagine a chimp fishing ants out of an anthill with a stick. The stick is an extension of her hand. While she’s holding that stick, she can’t use that hand for some other purpose, such as to defend herself from an attack by another chimp.
So as a medium makes one thing easy, it makes other things hard.
As you read this summary, you’re using different senses than if you had been listening to it. If you’re reading, you can easily re-read parts. If you were listening to me deliver it as a speech, you could only rely upon how fast you could take notes, or your short-term auditory memory.
If you’re reading on a laptop or a phone or an ebook reader, each of these devices will also change how you engage with the content. Reading on an ebook reader while lying alone on your couch is different than listening on a subway surrounded by people, or listening on a bluetooth speaker while cooking dinner.
THE MEDIUM ITSELF ALTERS THE CONTENT
A really subtle part of McLuhan’s basic description is that “personal and social consequences of any medium…[result]” from this altering of sense ratios.
What’s subtly implied here is that the content we’re so often concerned about – violence in video games, for example – is really caused by the medium itself.
As I write this summary, I’m thinking about what medium you’ll use to consume it. That’s changing the decisions I make.
I know if you find this summary through a search engine, you’ll be in a hurry. I know that search engines will rank my article based upon signals that suggest whether or not it was helpful for you. For these reasons, I’m trying to break up the article, so you can skim it in a hurry.
McLuhan doesn’t say this specifically, but any medium is Darwinian in nature. Only organisms suited for their environment survive. Only messages suited for the environment created by their medium survive. The medium is the message.
https://kadavy.net/medium-is-the-message-meaning/
Technology as Extensions of the Human Body
In our continuing look at Marshal McLuhan, the man who coined the term "global village" and the phrase "the medium is the message," we will reflect on what he had to say about the various ways human beings extend themselves, and how these extensions affect our relationships with one another. First, we must understand what McLuhan meant by the term "extension(s)."
An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope, or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.
Considering more complicated extensions, one might think of the automobile as an extension of the feet. It allows man to travel places in the same manner as the feet, only faster and with less effort. In addition, this extension enables one to travel in relative comfort in extreme weather conditions. Most individuals already understand the concept of extension, but many are unreflective when it comes to what McLuhan calls "amputations;" the counterpart to extensions.
Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of archery skills with the development of gunpowder and firearms. The need to be accurate with the new technology of guns made the continued practice of archery obsolete. The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations.
McLuhan believed that mankind has always been fascinated and obsessed with these extensions, but too frequently we choose to ignore or minimize the amputations. For example, we praise the advantages of high speed personal travel made available by the automobile, but do not really want to be reminded of the pollution it causes. Additionally, we do not want to be made to think about the time we spend alone in our cars isolated from other humans, or the fact that the resulting amputations from automobiles have made us more obese and generally less healthy. We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.
The Dangers of Over-extended Technology
We have discussed the idea of extensions and amputations caused by new
technology, which is introduced into society. The automobile was previously
mentioned as an extension of the foot. The car allows one to travel, just as
the foot does, only faster and with less effort. The amputations which
result would include loss of muscle strength in the under-utilized legs, and
the reduction in the quality of air we breathe.
Something occurs when a medium like the automobile, used for transportation,
becomes over-extended. The resulting amputations such as muscle atrophy,
smog, and high-speed fatalities increase at a rate that challenges the
benefits initially gained. Automobile fatalities, lung disease, and obesity
caused by modern transportation begin to outweigh the benefits of getting to
our destinations quicker and with less effort. The final movement is the
reversal of the benefits. McLuhan said:
Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.{8}
To this observation might be added the fact that we train children from a very young age to stand within a few feet of high-speed vehicles without being afraid. Less than two hundred years ago a screaming locomotive or a high speed automobile would have caused a person to flee in terror for their lives. We have slowly conditioned ourselves to not be afraid of something that is in fact extremely dangerous. Similarly, we know that speed limits of twenty miles an hour would almost certainly eliminate most car fatalities, but we also consider the advantages of getting to our destinations quicker to be worth the resulting death rate. Proof of this casual acceptance of the disadvantages of the car could be imagined if one were to consider the fate of a political candidate who ran on a platform of reducing the national speed limit to twenty miles per hour. We know the advantages, even before implementation, but we choose to accept the disadvantages because there is a privileging of all types of technological extension, even deadly and horrific forms.
https://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan believed that the nature of the medium that was being used to share a message was more important than the actual content of the message being shared. The medium places a filter on a message in a way that significantly influences how the message is interpreted.
McLuhan proposes that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. He showed that artifacts such as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content.
A great modern day example of this is Twitter. The 280-character limit on Twitter forces people to be quick and to the point — oftentimes sacrificing a lot of context in the process.
https://medium.com/the-mission/the-medium-is-the-message-7a42b8a41f8d
The mediums have changed the way we behave. Studies have shown that our memory spans have reduced due to digital technology. News stories have been replaced with 140 character tweets. Conversations have been replaced with emojis.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard of young children trying to turn the noise of their parents arguing down with a remote control. When reading a book I’ve had to stop myself moving my hand to press on a word to get the dictionary definition, after becoming familiar with the kindle’s user interface.
For McLuhan watching television changed the way we looked at the world. He said “It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.”
This has developed in the modern world with social media playing an important part in various civil and cultural events. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was a successful uprising in part due to the extensive use of Facebook and other social media. Online activism helped to organise and publicise demonstrations and acts of non-violent civil disobedience which resulted in the eventual overthrow of the government.
McLuhan prophesied that “Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know.” Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelations in 2013 exposed the 24/7 global surveillance intelligence agencies and governments undertake on their citizens. The public opinion of Snowden ranges from hero to traitor and underlines the dilemma that affects our society.
In McLuhan’s world, he refers to “One big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption”. We can see present day examples of this where tweets and comments posted online have resulted in job dismissals, arrests and online abuse. The deleting of these tweets or comments has minimal effect – anything posted on the internet potentially could last forever.
https://www.obtaineudaimonia.com/medium-message-marshall-mcluhan
McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" Nowadays
The term ‘medium’ refers to the communicative substrate that we choose to ‘fix’ a given message. McLuhan systematically asked himself what kind of media is favoured by the particular nature of a given media (Burke, 1966). Different examples include print, radio, film, television, the web and so on. The fascinating thing about media is how they invariably shape how a message is expressed and how the recipient perceives it.
Marshall McLuhan’s main thesis, which he developed and maintained throughout his career, is that media has a strong and invisible effect on the world, society, and how we view society. His famous catchphrase “the Medium is the Message” refers to his theory that the media is important, and regardless of the content, the effect will still be the same. To understand McLuhan’s theories, we must forget the symbolic content of what is being said or the superficial interpretation of the actual picture.
Instead, we must look deeper into the whole infrastructure of the medium itself. “The juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” is how McLuhan described a medium’s content (McLuhan 1969). For example, a set of similar words could be spoken face-to-face, printed on a piece of paper, or presented to the people via television. Despite being the same message, three different understandings may be perceived. McLuhan holds that modern communication media, computers, television and radio included, would have far-reaching consequences aesthetically, sociologically, and philosophically.
Any age’s dominant media controls people and reconnects different relationships with the world based on the motor sensor apparatus used. Some of the human civilisation milestones were the phonetic alphabet, printing press and the telegraph (Stevenson, 2000). This is because they greatly changed how people thought about themselves and also how they experienced the rest of the world.
According to McLuhan, there are three eras of social human history.
These are the Tribal Age,
the Age of Print, and
the Electronic Age.
The Tribal Age is characterised by a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life (Davis 1977). The phonetic alphabet and the print media revolutionised everything. The trading of an ‘eye for an ear’ resulted in a shift towards sequential, lineal thought, reducing the use of all the senses to a merely visual code (McLuhan 16 45).
The man began developing his own individuality during the age of print. The print offered the masses some privacy. Society became fragmented as people’s thinking ways and how they looked at the world changed. McLuhan links the beginning of connected thinking and logic directly to the phonetic alphabet. The telegraph’s invention marked the beginning of the end of the reign of Age of Print. This was the birth of the Electronic Age.
The introduction of new electronic media, i.e. television sets (and film) and radio caused the printed word’s power to decrease significantly. McLuhan observed a reversal of the three-thousand-year bias towards a visual culture favouring the pre-alphabetic, and more sensor-balanced, oral tradition. This instant communication greatly reduces our individuality but also connects people. This is because everyone can now share the same experience of watching the same images on different television sets at the same time with the same effects. McLuhan coined the phrase ‘the Global Village’ where the electronic media re-tribalises human beings. (Rosen, 2007)
McLuhan views most technology and media as mere extensions of man. This he refers to as self-amputation. This is where we create a medium or technology with the aim of replacing or modifying some other extension(s). For instance, the wheel can be considered as an extension of the foot; clothing can be viewed as the technical projection of skin (Stevenson, 2001). McLuhan holds that humankind’s obsession and fascination with these extensions have been there for a very long time, but more often than not, they choose to minimise or even totally ignore the amputations.
For example, people praise the benefits of owning a car and being able to move from one place to another at high speed, but they opt not to be reminded of the numerous negative consequences. These can include the loss of the strength of the muscles and poorer quality of air. Any new form of media or technology is bound to bring disruption and threaten the delicate balance of human senses (Durham, 2006). It is the response to the speed and power of the new extension that causes even more extensions. These, in turn, create new stresses within society.
McLuhan’s differentiation with regard to the media’s effects is ‘hot’ and ‘cool’. The defining characteristic is determined by the degree and type of tribal or social participation the medium demands on us. ‘Hot’ media are those that contain relatively complete sensory data. For this reason, the perceiver has a significantly less need to become involved by filling in the missing data. Meanwhile, ‘cool’ media requires the individual to participate by filling in the missing information. A lecture requires, for instance, less participation than a seminar does. Therefore the lecture is ‘hot’ while the seminar is ‘cool’ (McLuhan, 1969). By participation, McLuhan refers to the completeness (hot) or incompleteness (cool) of the stimuli and not the degree of interest or time spent on that particular communication medium.
Since it requires high audience participation, the internet would be a very cool medium. It has the possibility of warming up a little and maybe even become less interactive if some more television-like features were added to it (Settels, 1969). The film can be cooled down if it changes, but at the moment, it is still very hot. Television is relatively cool. However, it can be made cooler with widespread interactive television. Television watching has for long been regarded as a routine, unproblematic and passive process. The meanings of the television programs are seen as given and obvious; the viewer is seen as passively receptive and mindless (Smith, 2008).
Therefore, this means that all the audience has to do is to sit and stare without thinking, yet the audience is highly involved because of the low-resolution monitor, mosaic screen and therefore, greater mental participation. McLuhan regards television as a ‘cool’ medium. This is because it leaves spaces for the media to participate and shows lower levels of information technology.
Watching television and reading a book are very different from each other. When it comes to reading, we can choose to go to a different location and read the book at our own pace. The writings in the book will always be there. However, television is like an endless flow which we cannot capture; all we do is tune in and become part of the silent audience. McLuhan observed that the ability of television to attract people to certain events, bringing together different places and times simultaneously and at a high-speed meant the beginning of a new electronic age. Clearly, information transmission depends on the medium in use, and, in that narrow sense, the medium is the message (McLuhan 2001).
This could be the reason why so many people were drawn to the events immediately after the terrorist bombings of September 11th, 2001. Many described the event as ‘surreal’, and many more had trouble fully comprehending it. The mass media portrayed the attacks as a television event that was drama-filled with heroism and special effects (Hirsch, 2009).
In a movie, the medium is hot, and everything is already arranged for us such that we can process the information already given more easily. Since we are accustomed to seeing that kind of violence in movies, it may be too traumatic to process in a different medium where more thought must be used. The attacks on the World Trade Centre are deeply stuck in the minds and senses of many people. Cool media, such as television, can explain the circumstances, allowing the audience to immerse themselves into the event.
Marshall McLuhan was among the first people to see media as a major force in the shaping of any society. He was most definitely the first to popularise the idea, and also one of the first to say that technology is an extension of the human body. With cameras and televisions improving the efficiency of our eyes, satellite dishes increasing the sensitivity of our ears, and computers and the internet boosting our brains’ power, the human body has become fully extended through communication technology.
His theories and ideas may not all be correct. However, many of his predictions (for example the concept of the Global Village) are so correct to the extent that his work is being re-investigated by communication scholars. The important thing is that the ideas of Marshall McLuhan can help us look at our society and everything that is happening today from a new angle. This can then help us work out newer and more efficient solutions to some of the oldest problems.
By saying that the medium is the message, McLuhan attempted to describe how the unique strengths, limitations and powers of a given medium will exert forces on the message that is being communicated that can approach the significance of the very content being communicated. In other times, it even eclipses it. This happens on both ends – media shape both the creation of communication and its interpretation.
...A medium that has disputably stunted human interaction in a social setting is television. McLuhan argued that the rise of the television turned the family circle into a semi-circle. What does this mean? Take the family circle before everyone had a television. With no mediator, two-way communications between humans were bountiful. After the television was introduced into homes, it greatly reduced the communication between humans. People adjusted to one way communication between a screen and themselves. Even if other family members were in the same room, communication between one member of the family and another who was in the same house was greatly reduced (Innis, 1980).
Of course, an argument for the other side can also be made, that television has amplified the way we connect as a society. Sporting events such as hockey, football and even the Olympics can bring people together, whether it be in a bar or with a couple of friends over at home...
https://studycorgi.com/mcluhans-the-medium-is-the-message-nowadays/
