McLuhan
Author and social theorist Tom Wolfe once commented on Canadian professor Marshal McLuhan’s mantra, “the medium is the message” saying:
The new technologies…radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesn’t matter what the content of a medium like t.v. is… 20 hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in peoples teeth or… Pablo Casals droning away on his cello.
How is it that violence and the arts are effective in the same manner? Wouldn’t the content be the most important factor in analyzing a television program? To understand Marshall McLuhan’s theories the reader must not be concerned with the symbolic content of what is being said or the cosmetic interpretation of the actual show but rather, look deeper into the whole infrastructure of the medium itself.
McLuhan was prone to thinking up “clever” analogies and plays on words; and describing the content of a medium was no different. He described it as “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” We are the content of our media because the way we live life is largely a function of the way we process information. That information is presented and made available by way of a certain medium. In turn, each medium delivers a new message and a new form of human being, whose qualities are suited to it. The same words spoken face to face, printed on paper, or presented on television provide three different messages simply because of the different senses used to perceive it.
McLuhan thought primary channels of communication change the way we look at the world around us. The dominant medium of any age governs people and reconnects modes of relationships with the world based on which sensory motor apparatus is being activated.
Dominant epochs spring from the phonetic alphabet, printing press, and the telegraph, which were turning points in society because they changed the way people thought about themselves.
To understand how and why people are affected by television, one must first become familiar with McLuhan’s idea of the electronic age. With the advent of television, the power of the printed word is decreased significantly. Books become “made-for-t.v.”
movies and newspapers come alive with twenty-four hour a day headlines. Marshall McLuh...
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...ert themselves into the story. Perhaps this is one piece of an elaborate mosaic of cultural activity that works toward a unified ideological end, whether intentional or not.
With cameras and televisions enhancing our eyes, satellite dishes increasing the sensitivity of our ears, and computers and the Internet augmenting the power of our brains, the human body has finally become fully extended through communication technology. In these respects, McLuhan was on to something. Unfortunately, one could not overlook McLuhan’s often abandonment of the linearity and order that he claimed were the legacy of print technology. His truths were enigmatic and seldom woven into a comprehensive system; at times he implied that chosen words are irrelevant while other times he declared the significance of the symbols were a matter of degree. His leaps of faith were a major hindrance to taking him seriously. Near the end, he was accused of selling out by Stuart Hall, fellow media theorist. But, as Kenneth Boulding in McLuhan: Hot and Cold stated, “It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.” Maybe we should give Marshal McLuhan another swing.
Not only educational shows accomplish these goals, but fictional television programs can often incorporate information that requires viewers to grapple with a topic using logical reasoning and a global consciousness. In addition, not to diminish the importance of reading, television reaches those who may never pick up a book or who might struggle with reading problems, enabling a broader spectrum of people to interact with cognitive topics. Veith has committed the error of making generalizations about two forms of media when, in truth, the situation varies depending on quality and content. However, what follows these statements is not just fallacious, but
1. Sobchack’s argument pertaining to on -screen violence that she wrote thirty years ago was that any violent acts portrayed in movies back then was to emphasize the importance of an element in a story, an emphatic way of engaging the viewers and forcing them to feel what the movie was about. It gave them a sense of the substance of the plot which would allow them to feel for the characters and yearn for good to overcome evil. In other words, the effort made to engage audiences through depictions of violence created violence that was artistic and well done, or as Sobchack writes, violence was “aestheticized.” Violence was incorporated into film in a stylistic way, and even though violence in all forms is offending, twenty five years ago when it was seen in film, it had a greater impact on audiences because it had meaning (Sobchack 429).
In the second chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me Lowen argues that electronic media has decisively and irriversibly changed the character of our environment. He believes that we are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by televison not by the printed word. Loewen describes how discourse in America is now different from what it once was. Loewwen says discourse was once logical, serious, and rational and now under the governance of television it is shriveled and absurd. In addition, he writes about the definitions of truth and the sources in which the definitions come from. Loewen shows how the bias of a medium is unseen throughout a culture and he gives three examples of truth telling.
Postman wrote 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles. Postman's best known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. It explores the decline of the communication medium as television images have replaced the written word. Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan to argue that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge, and describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information in different ways.
The many evils that exist within television’s culture were not foreseen back when televisions were first put onto the market. Yet, Postman discovers this very unforgiveable that the world did not prepare itself to deal with the ways that television inherently changes our ways of communication. For example, people who lived during the year 1905, could not really predict that the invention of a car would not make it seem like only a luxurious invention, but also that the invention of the car would strongly affect the way we make decisions.
Flew, T., & Smith, R. (Canadian). (2011). New: Media An Introduction. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press p.
People all around agree that technology is changing how we think, but is it changing us for the better? Clive Thompson definitely thinks so and this book is his collection of why that is. As an avid fiction reader I wasn’t sure this book would captivate me, but the 352 pages seemingly flew past me. The book is a whirlwind of interesting ideas, captivating people, and fascinating thoughts on how technology is changing how we work and think.
The ideas put forth in Marshall McLuhan's Media Hot and Cold, present many theories regarding the effects of media on the world. What qualifies as media, in essence, is any experience or information, imparted on the awareness of an individual and/or societies. These can be physical or nonphysical influences. TV and radio are examples of physical media. Their effects and evolution can be easily observed. However, and perhaps more importantly, McLuhan examines those nonphysical influences which can be observed in the individual and society. It is not enough to merely identify these mediums as such. What is more crucial is the perpetual waxing and waning of influence of such ineffable phenomena, whose identity and existence rely upon their interdependency
The main thesis of this chapter “the medium is the message” refers to how the medium is more influential to our society than the content that is delivered through the medium. Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium is an extension of ourselves. The new scale, described as the “message”, is introduced into human affairs by the medium and it results in series of personal and social consequences. He used the electric light as an example to prove his thesis. The electric light is a medium without a content unless it is given a meaning; however, it still helps to eliminate time and space factors in human association and have a significant impact on the nature of society just like radio and television.
Throughout the book, McKibben compares the two experiences, contrasting the amount of useful information he received from nature, as opposed to the amount of useless, hollow information the television provided. He goes on in the book to make several very important observations about how the television has fundamentally changed our culture and lifestyle, from the local to the global level. Locally, McKibben argues, television has a detrimental effect on communities.
As a result, the society of this scary inhumane, Brave New World is full with technology that is destroying humanity form us. Yes it is a perfect world and there no war, disease, crisis but also there is no emotions, feeling, love and especially any hope which are some of the necessary part of human nature. As a conclusion, technology controls the life of everyday people from the day they were born till the day they die in this Brave New World.
Griffin, E. (1997). A First Look at Communication, Third Edition. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
McLuhan’s work with literature and culture produced the revolutionary thought that “the medium is the message.” In other words, cultures are changed not only by the “content” of technology, but also by the technology itself.
“The medium is the message,” uttered by the late media scholar and theorist Marshall McLuhan, and they have been revered and dissected ever since they were spoken. There has been several different interpretations on the premise of McLuhan’s words, and the meaning behind them. The best way to start unraveling his theory, is to get a general understanding of the terms used in his famous quote. In McLuhan’s own words, a medium is simply “an extension of ourselves.” Simply put the medium personifies or enhances what we as humans cannot do on our own. In a mass media perspective this means the use of technology including radio, television, and the Internet to project our thoughts, feelings, and senses (Frederman) . Finally, it is important to note that the plural of the word medium is media. Now that there is a general understanding of the medium, the other important word McLuhan spoke of is the “message”. The message is simply what the audience perceives through the medium. This could be anything from watching a television program or listening to the radio. Also, note that some believe the message McLuhan preached is a lot more complicated and not obvious. This view can be explained by, the message isn’t the news, but the attitudes that are affected by watching or listening to the message. Whichever, definition is taken for the “message”, the dissection of McLuhan’s quote will still be interpreted in a similar fashion.
Today, in modern society, mass media has become the dominant method of social communication, providing every individual with an unending stream of information. When information is transmitted through mass media, it tends to become symbolic in nature, i.e. representing social and cultures norms and values. This information has the ability to influence the way we think or how we perceive events occurring in our lives.