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MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012

A central idea of communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) who demonstrated that each media (print, speech, television) is connected with a different pattern or arrangement among the senses and thus results in a different awareness or perception.

Although the literal message of a radio report of a disaster and the television coverage of the same event may be identical, the event will be perceived differently and take on different meaning because the two media arrange the senses differently.

In this sense the medium (the singular for the word media) is the message; this message is often more important than the literal message.

"By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth, will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. We must serve our electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which we once served our coracle, our canoe, our typography, and all other extensions of our physical organs. But, there is a difference here. Those previous technologies were partial and fragmentary. The electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is now possible to store and to translate everything; and as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier." Mcluhan, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man, 1963 

How the Medium is the Message in the Unconscious of `America Online' 
Bob Hodge, University of Western Sydney, b.hodge@uws.edu.au 
This article explores McLuhan's famous slogan `the medium is the message' as a point of departure for examining current views of the nature of the new electronic media understood as a revolutionary form, associated with a new (`post-modern') stage of society. It argues that this slogan packs into itself more layers of meaning than he was able to articulate in a complex and nuanced theory of the media. It suggests that McLuhan's work constructs a productive idea of a media unconscious. It shows in detail how `messages' are encoded in new visual forms associated with the new electronic media, using the logo of `America Online' (AOL), an internet provider, as exemplary text. This logo carries implicit messages about the nature of these media, in a kind of dialogue with McLuhan. Messages and dialogue alike need a new space in which they can occur: a theory of unconscious dimensions of media. - vcj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/3/341

The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition - Marshall McLuhan Review Marshall McLuhan is now a power in more than one land. --The New Statesman His critics are infuriated by his ideas...but some think his foretell our real future. --Harper's When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century. This edition of McLuhan's best-known book both enhances its accessibility to a general audience and provides the full critical apparatus necessary for scholars. In Terrence Gordon's own words, "McLuhan is in full flight already in the introduction, challenging us to plunge with him into what he calls 'the creative process of knowing.'" Much to the chagrin of his contemporary critics McLuhan's preference was for a prose style that explored rather than explained. Probes, or aphorisms, were an indispensable tool with which he sought to prompt and prod the reader into an "understanding of how media operates" and to provoke reflection. In the 1960s McLuhan s theories aroused both wrath and admiration. It is intriguing to speculate what he might have to say 40 years later on subjects to which he devoted whole chapters such as Television, The Telephone, Weapons, Housing and Money. Today few would dispute that mass media have indeed decentralized modern living and turned the world into a global village. This critical edition features an appendix that makes available for the first time the core of the research project that spawned the book and individual chapter notes are supported by a glossary of terms, indices of subjects, names, and works cited. There is also a complete bibliography of McLuhan's published works. W. Terrence Gordon is Associate General Editor of the Gingko Press McLuhan publishing program, author of the biography Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding and McLuhan for Beginners.

The Medium is the Message: And 50 Other Ridiculous Advertising Rules (Ridiculous Design Rules) - Anneloes van Gaalen The Medium is the Message provides a list of inspirational or delusional advertising jargon for the world to judge. Anneloes van Gaalen (1979) is an all-around creative, working as a writer, editor, curator, and documentary filmmaker. After receiving a MA and MPhil in English, American Studies, and Cultural Analysis, she started writing for a wide variety of publications.

The Ad Medium Is the Message: Public Attitudes Toward Advertising Depend On the Ad Medium - SHARON SHAVITT 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Department of Business Administration
PAMELA M. LOWREY, UIUC-CBA Office of Research Working Paper No. 01-0123 
Abstract: A total of 2514 adults were surveyed regarding their opinions about ads in either, 1) TV, 2) radio, 3) catalogs, 4) business classifieds, 5) out-of-home, or 6) advertising in general. Media that allow for self-selected exposure, where perceived interest in an ad is the basis for exposure to it, were evaluated much more favorably than more intrusive advertising media. Catalogs and business classifieds elicited the most confidence; TV advertising elicited the least. Confidence in advertising in general most closely resembled that for TV advertising. More confidence in advertising was reported by males, people under 35, and people with less education or lower incomes. However, media differences generally cut across demographic lines. - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=303863

"The Medium" Is the Message - Bill Wadge 
Abstract: It is our position (following Plaice and Kropf) that mathematics and software engineering does not provide a very good basis for understanding communities. These formalisms are necessarily influenced by a mechanical, atomistic outlook which sees collections as arbitrary assemblages of self sufficient individuals communicating point to point in a vacuum. 
I suggest instead that ideas of Marshall McLuhan provide a much better starting point because they give a central role to the medium by which the members of a community communicate. Furthermore, I argue that the phrase "the medium" should also be interpreted in the sense used in (say) biology, as a nurturing extended substance (a plenum) which fills the space between the individuals and to some degree permeates their interiors. 
Finally, I argue Swoboda's context server project can be understand as realizing Plaice/Kropf "intensional communities" by formalizing and implementing a nurturing medium which permeates the (software used by) each community member. - springerlink.com/content/vtm7hdbwcbcqmclu/

Multimedia Reviews: Multimedia Overload Produces "Symplexity" - Frank Zingrone
Introduction by the column editor: We humans "know" from information mediated through our "natural senses." All outside signals come to us through some medium—sound waves, pressure and touch, light waves, radio and television waves, and so forth. McLuhan's famous mantra "The medium is the message" paradoxically highlighted the critical transformation of meaning when each type of medium—radio, television, drums, hand signals—by its very nature modifies the message it is transmitting.In this month's column Dr. Zingrone brings challenging new ideas to the field of human communication and vividly describes the communication distortions that occur when the overload of increasingly complex modern media results in a paradoxical diminution of meaning itself. He has coined a term for this unintended consequence and given it to his exciting new book, The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos (1). Many of us may recognize the effect created by this accelerating phenomenon—our stupefaction as we experience the onslaught of sound and visual signals produced by a television news screen, where an avalanche of rapidly changing, overlapping, and distorted visual images flash at our eyes while screeching, undulating synthetic "music" crashes about our ears. And in that chaos we struggle to find meaning,Dr. Zingrone, who worked with McLuhan and who has written extensively about his work (2,3), has succeeded in his new book to move the pioneering work of human communication scientists forward and thereby help us all to understand the developing paradox and danger of more communication yet less meaning. - psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/3/311

Is The Medium The Message?
themodernartsite.com - Review - by Jeff Lee
Colville Place Gallery - Penelope Wakeham - Painting with Numbers
'The Medium Is The Message' is a slogan from a media commentator called Marshall MacLuhan. He proposed that the innate qualities of a medium determine the content of the message put through it. If we have TV, our message is made up of movement and sound, and if we have drawing, our message is made up of marks on a surface. The limitations, goes the argument, aren't so much the midwife as the parent. This was exciting stuff in the sixties, and is now a standard discussion in art institutions. "Oh but the message is pure" wail MacLuhan's critics, "artists determine their message, not mere paint." Or do they?

The medium is the message: A media specific analysis of the Communications Decency Act - Janet Osen 
“The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase in his 1964 primer on the nature of the media, television was king. At the time, McLuhan postulated that television as a medium would have far greater impact on mankind than its programming content. The argument of carrier versus content has since broadened to include new technologies. With the decision of the Philadelphia Federal Court on the unconstitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, McLuhan's theory is once again in the spotlight and the debate over the power and scope of the media has reached the Internet. Available online 19 March 1999. - sciencedirect.com

Marshall McLuhan and the WWW: Is the Medium Still the Message?
Russell McNeil, Malaspina University-College, March 29, 1999
Introduction: I met Marshall McLuhan 42 years ago - once - he drove me and his twin daughters to an engagement where we all were competing in an Ontario wide competition using the medium of speech. Marshall - the father - sat politely and indulgently in the audience absorbing the machinations of some 30 of us who were offering opinions and oratory and rhetoric on issues of the day - as seen through the filters of our 11 year old minds. I waxed poetic on the theme of conservation and ecology, although that word had not yet been coined. When the judges rendered their verdicts, I found myself in a place I had never been before - or since - a first place winner for the Province of Ontario. The decades that have swum by since then have taught me that this particular honour was rendered more for cuteness than rhetorical finesse. McLuhan applauded gracefully - the father had done his chore. McLuhan was not "known" to me then as any other than Mary and Teresa's Dad. If he had a job I certainly didn't care what it was. I have since wondered though if perhaps by some magic of connections the words I am about to share by McLuhan - written just five years after that contest involving the medium of speech - might not have been inspired on that night - and seeded somewhere in McLuhan's subconscious mind? Perhaps not. - mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/lec/lecmedium.htm

From "The message is the medium An interview with Manuel Castells"
"‘The medium is the message’ means that the materiality of organizing the communication process fundamentally shapes the ways the message is going to be received. If we say that ‘The message is the medium’ it means that the content of the message organizes the process of communication. As you suggest, and I agree with you, communication is also the message. To take an example, there are all kinds of studies that show that there is little correlation between advertising and consumers’ actual behaviour. Yet, billions are spent on advertising. 
Why? Because the other guy also does it, everybody does it. In the context in which everybody does it, if you don’t advertise then you go into different logics, into the binary logics of communication and noncommunication. If you don’t exist in the communication field, then you have a problem. In fact everybody exists in the communication field, so the actual benefit, the marginal benefit to each advertiser is very small. Noncommunication, rather than communication, becomes more important." - gmc.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/1/2/135.pdf

If the Medium Is the Message, What Does SMS Say?
Overview: There is something wrong with short message services (SMS). By wrong I don’t mean that the system doesn’t work or that it is not popular, indeed nothing could be further from the truth. No - based on the web orthodoxies SMS shouldn’t work. Typing an SMS means using a tiny non-querty keyboard. SMS allows only 160 characters of text, no fancy pictures and sounds and no bandwidth or multimedia. Customers have to pay to send an SMS (shock horror!) Yet for all that, SMS is spectacularly successful, particularly with the youth market. 
More than 15 billion SMS messages per month are sent worldwide. Cable and Wireless Optus recently reported a 1,000% increase in SMS traffic1. Why is it that this simple messaging capability works so well? How will it evolve and what are the implications for the mobile Internet? - whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=22609  

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