McLuhan: the medium is the message

(from Key Terms in Media ... Lauphey pp.33-35)

(1) McLuhan is perhaps the only media theorist to have become a media celebrity. During the height of his fame he even played a cameo role in Woody Allen’s acclaimed film, Annie Hall (1977). Beginning with Innis’s ideas about the impact of the printing press on information monopolies, McLuhan’s medium theory states that any advanced modern society is shaped by the various media technologies that are available to it. Media have powerful effects on societies. Moreover, media become extensions of ourselves; extensions of our human senses. What matters, then, is not the content of these media technologies but the technologies themselves. Take television, for instance. It matters not in the least whether we refer to a soap opera, a news bulletin, a serial drama, a documentary, and so forth. What matters is the medium, not the message, because ‘the ‘‘message’’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’. In other words, the messages contained in any medium are inseparable from the medium’s human consequences, and it is these consequences that matter most. Therefore, ‘‘the medium is the message’’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’.

(2) We can best understand McLuhan’s medium theory by examining how it compares the properties of different media. McLuhan’s principal distinction is between ‘hot media’ and ‘cold media’. Hot media require low levels of audience participation because they ‘extend one single sense in ‘‘high definition’’ ’ and are ‘well filled with data’. A typical photograph, for example, requires little effort in defining what it represents. A cartoon, in comparison, is a cold medium because – with less visual data – it requires higher levels of sensory participation (i.e. eye work) in order to be defined. A similar distinction can be drawn between film and television. Film is a hotter medium than television because its richer visual resolution requires lower audience participation. The celluloid and projection technologies of film, McLuhan claims, provide high-definition visual data in comparison to the scan lines transmitted through television. Even high-definition television, while hotter than standard television images, cannot compete with the heat of 35-millimetre movie images. You have to work harder as a television viewer than a film spectator. Some other hot and cold media comparisons are listed below.

HOT media versus COLD media

(3) McLuhan argues that this distinction in the properties of different media technologies effectively shapes how we use and learn from them. Hot media tend to function as easily forgotten and highly disposable entertainment forms; cold media, by contrast, afford greater capacity for learning because they require higher levels of sensory participation, concentration and literacy skills. This distinction is thoughtful but – to be critical – does not always allow for clear-cut examples. The internet, for instance, requires higher levels of participation (including computer literacy skills) than television in one sense, but in another sense – speed of information – it requires less participation. If I want to know the news headlines, the internet is likely to involve the least participation in terms of time because television news headlines only appear at intervals. The internet is therefore a hotter medium than television in some sense and a cooler medium in another.

(4) McLuhan’s emphasis on (hot or cold) medium over message, format over content can appear somewhat abstract and is certainly open to debate. Before we address some criticisms of medium theory, though, we should consider McLuhan’s argument in a wider historical context. We tend to take television for granted today, but it is a relatively recent media technology that only became widespread in developed countries during the middle of the twentieth century, and in many developing countries a good deal later. The impact television made on human actions and behaviour is still difficult to measure, and could only really have been felt by a particular generation of people who witnessed its advent and subsequently adopted it. (5) So imagine an event like the one that occurred on September 11th 2001. Two planes crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. How did the vast majority of the world’s population experience this event? Of course, they watched the shocking images on television. But what if an event similar to 9/11 had occurred in 1801 rather than 2001? The event (and the message sent out by its terrorist perpetrators) would have still been shocking to hear about, but ‘hear about it’ – through word-of-mouth or, if we were wealthy and educated, reading about it in a newspaper – is all we could have done, because in 1801 television and other electrical media did not exist. The medium is the message here in the sense that the medium through which a message is sent to its receiver dictates the power of that message. Today’s media technologies are, on the whole but with a few exceptions, hotter than yesterday’s cool technologies.

(5) Like Innis’s theory of media bias, McLuhan’s medium theory can only be understood through a historical lens. Medium theory is inseparable from the processes of modernity undergone by advanced industrial societies. McLuhan refers to three eras of media history within the wider context of modernity:

(6) Since the turn of the twentieth century an era of retribalization has evolved in tandem with the electrical age of media communications. Telephone, television and the internet, for instance, are shrinking the world and bringing people closer together via audio and visual media. This is the inspiration behind another well-known phrase coined by McLuhan: ‘the global village’. We no longer live in tribal villages in the literal sense, but in the metaphorical sense electrical media have expanded our horizons to such an extent that we feel a vicarious intimacy with people and places all over the world. The advent of the internet and email communications has helped to revive McLuhan’s medium theory and specifically his ideas about an era of retribalization in today’s global village.

(7) Nonetheless, medium theory has undergone sustained criticism and McLuhan has as many opponents as exponents. Particularly problematic is the assumption that media and communications technologies revolutionize all parts of social and economic life. This contradicts a theory of social exclusion which incorporates the idea that less affluent societies and social classes do not gain the same access to or benefit from technologies enjoyed by those who can afford to invest in them. (6022)

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 862