Rolled Hem

On Tuesday we discussed Understanding Media, Ch. 1: The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. I had a difficult time understanding this reading because of McLuhan’s complexity in his thought process. However, through our class discussion I started to understand McLuhan’s argument. He states that “medium is the message.” To fully understand this statement we have to understand what he means by medium and what he means by message.

To begin with, if you think about a movie, what part of a movie do you think is the medium and what part the message? The medium would be the act of seeing the movie or becoming engaged in the movie. It could also be the film making process. I interpret it as everything that goes into making the movie, the speech, the acting, the special effects, etc. The message would then be what happens in the movie, the actual script. Another example to further understand medium and message is blogs. The medium of blogs is everything that blogs can do: upload pictures, u-tubes, writing in html, being able to write on a blog, etc. So the content, what you write in your blog is then the message.

I think that McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message” is validated with the examples I have listed above. Using the blog example, without the ability to write on a blog, upload pictures, etc, we wouldn’t be able to get our message across, the content. The message of a blog is what we write and without this ability, the medium, we can’t write our “message.” So, the medium is the message because without the medium we can’t have a message.

However, there is one example that he talks about that doesn’t have a message, the electric light. “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.” To explain this he goes on to say that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print and print is the content of the telegraph.” What he means is that the medium enables other things to happen so that is its content. You could argue, though, that the content of the electric light is what it is being used for like night baseball or surgery, however he says that “it could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” I’m not convinced that the electric light has no message because everything can have a medium but not everything can have a message because the medium “shapes” the message. If the medium chooses not to “shape” a message, like the electric light, then there is no message.