visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Sep 21 2008

Category: Summaries

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Mcluhan, M. and Q. Fiore (1967). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books.

The Medium is the Massage was written in 1967 (two years before I was born) and in it McLuhan discusses voice, writing, and “electric” media (esp. television) and their effects on individuals, cognition and society.   The graphic design of this book is said to have been the basis for the design of Wired magazine [1].

He says “Societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication” (p. 9).   The book seems to be at least partly a reaction against the printed word, with its rationality and linearity, with its emphasis of the visual at the expense of the auditory and tactile, and with its encouragement to people to go off and be individuals and abandon the company of their fellows as opposed to electronic media’s global village.

I think McLuhan is strongly emphasizing the participatory role of information technology (primarily electronic communication) in some cases, and its mass media broadcast role in others.

• Electronic communication technology lessens distance (by reducing the time it takes to talk) between people and thus weakens social boundaries. McLuhan is believed to have coined the term “global village,” [1] meaning this is both in the sense of community (p. 10) and in the sense of “it takes a village to raise a child” (p. 13); electronic data storage and communication allows people to access information that their peers, family and locality don’t have.
• Different media use our senses (sight, sound, touch, (smell, taste?)) in different ways, and this in turn affects the way we think and view the world, which in turn affects the environment we build for ourselves.  That’s the “massage” in the title.
• The environment we live in is invisible to us, embedded in it as we are.  One purpose of art is to draw our attention to the world we live in.
• Disruptive technologies can be incomprehensible to an established environment.  People try to use the new technologies to keep doing what they did with the old one (p. 74) (single loop) while not seeing that the new tech fundamentally changes what can be done (double loop).
• New media emphasizes a holistic rather than reductionistic way of living: roles rather than goals.
• The printing press helped bring about individualism in ways that the copied book (copied by monks) or the oral tradition (bards) could not. Printing technology created copyright, and electronic media may change how that is implemented. He says that the idea of copyright came with the advent of printing technology (p. 122), because the effort of copying texts was so great that there was no public readership, no public.   Texts were shared among a small group of scholars and there was no commercial aspect.   Printing technology created public readership, and suddenly you could sell your books.  Fighting piracy became important, and thus copyright.  He starts to consider the effect of cheap reproduction (Xeroxing) on copyright and how it becomes easier to get around it (p. 123)

References

1. “Marshall McLuhan”, wikipedia.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan , retrieved Sep 21, 2008.