Friday, November 30, 2012
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
McLuhan
As a Film and Media Studies student I have been exposed to McLuhan's concept and writing before. After taking several classes analyzing film, television, and print media you begin to see just how useful and relevant his ideas are. In the end, you do have to admit that there is a degree of truth to his statement. So much of our society has been impacted by the medium itself over content. Take the Bible and the Qur'an for example. Both are examples of a print medium, and both happen to fall under the category of religious texts. One could argue that because of their differing content their message is fundamentally different. But if you compare the two cultures that have evolved out of the influence of both religions, one will undoubtedly find numerous similarities. In both Christian and Muslim societies there are radicals, capitalists, liberals; a multitude of diverse individuals all impacted by the medium of two different religious texts. The medium of the religious text is thus seen to impact all of mankind, regardless of geographical/cultural distribution in the same way. Two diverse societies emerge, centered on their own respective prophet. The similarities in our religions and cultures (a by-product of religion, to an extent) help show how the medium can in fact be the message.
To bring McLuhan's argument to something a little more tangible and relevant to our course, I'll bring up a reading I did in another class in a unit focusing on McLuhan's idea. We read a selection from Raymond Wiliiams' Television: Technology and Cultural Form in which Williams basically showed that regardless of what's on TV, Americans watch it constantly. Our viewing habits have no relation to content, based on the data he compiled. This would go on to suggest that we don't watch TV for the sake of any content, rather we watch it just for the sake of partaking in the experience of the medium. Society has become fixated with the mere televisual experience above all. This would seem to jive with McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message above content.
Even in this class the medium has an impact on us. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, we often employ traditions of film in our videos. By traditions of film I mean the standardized (often cinematographic) conventions that have come to define the nature of the film medium. For example, we cannot help but use montage in our videos; it is something that has become so universal in the film medium as a way of effectively communicating ideas to the audience. Regardless of the content of our individual films, we are impacted by the standardized nature of film (that's not to say that we can't be unique and develop our own unique techniques and styles).
At the same time, I feel McLuhan's argument has considerable flaws that actually reveal the importance of content in every medium. He uses several blanket statements and radical comparisons between technology and media that don't really seem to have any rational grounding. For example, he uses the light bulb as an example of a medium being the message. As it is a widespread way of communicating information, he shows that a light bulb is a subtle medium that content has no obvious bearing on. However, I would argue that light bulbs are more of a product of survival rather than communications. Human beings need light in the night. it has undoubtedly saved millions of lives and enabled the existence of billions. To say it is exclusively a product of communication is just absurd. The light bulb was not invented to be a communicant, this is a byproduct of living in a successful commercial society. To base an argument on something that wasn't developed as an exclusive means of communication seems pretty shaky. I have a hard time finding the relevance between the light bulb and traditional mediums, such as print and film.
Thus, his arguments are just as unfounded as Sarnoff's and Forster's are. I don't think he really has the grounds to criticize their work given the sweeping generalizations he makes throughout this paper. To even argue the point he is arguing contradicts his own point. As that audience member pointed out in the interview we watched last Tuesday, if the medium is the message what is the point of his writing in this paper? If content has no important bearing on our society, why write anything ever?
The fallacies of his argument actually reveal how important content is to the concept medium as message. In my opinion, content is a huge part of any medium. I believe it can have impacts on the way we think. In the print medium, it is especially the case that if you can't communicate your content effectively your argument falls flat on its face. Without substantial content, no medium can stand.
Content is essential to effective communicative mediums. Samuel Beckett often commented on miscommunication in human society through his short, choppy, often nonsensical and circular dialogue. Plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame. In using this approach, the content embodies the whole point of the medium: communication. Without effective content, communication breaks down.
As my artist inspiration I'll include the following link from the Seinfeld episode "The Puffy Shirt," an episode focused on break downs in communications (a theme the show seems to be obsessed with).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFRoXoh6aks
By exploring miscommunication in its own televisual medium, this episode emphasizes the importance of maintaining clear content in order to take full use of the medium.
To bring McLuhan's argument to something a little more tangible and relevant to our course, I'll bring up a reading I did in another class in a unit focusing on McLuhan's idea. We read a selection from Raymond Wiliiams' Television: Technology and Cultural Form in which Williams basically showed that regardless of what's on TV, Americans watch it constantly. Our viewing habits have no relation to content, based on the data he compiled. This would go on to suggest that we don't watch TV for the sake of any content, rather we watch it just for the sake of partaking in the experience of the medium. Society has become fixated with the mere televisual experience above all. This would seem to jive with McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message above content.
Even in this class the medium has an impact on us. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, we often employ traditions of film in our videos. By traditions of film I mean the standardized (often cinematographic) conventions that have come to define the nature of the film medium. For example, we cannot help but use montage in our videos; it is something that has become so universal in the film medium as a way of effectively communicating ideas to the audience. Regardless of the content of our individual films, we are impacted by the standardized nature of film (that's not to say that we can't be unique and develop our own unique techniques and styles).
At the same time, I feel McLuhan's argument has considerable flaws that actually reveal the importance of content in every medium. He uses several blanket statements and radical comparisons between technology and media that don't really seem to have any rational grounding. For example, he uses the light bulb as an example of a medium being the message. As it is a widespread way of communicating information, he shows that a light bulb is a subtle medium that content has no obvious bearing on. However, I would argue that light bulbs are more of a product of survival rather than communications. Human beings need light in the night. it has undoubtedly saved millions of lives and enabled the existence of billions. To say it is exclusively a product of communication is just absurd. The light bulb was not invented to be a communicant, this is a byproduct of living in a successful commercial society. To base an argument on something that wasn't developed as an exclusive means of communication seems pretty shaky. I have a hard time finding the relevance between the light bulb and traditional mediums, such as print and film.
Thus, his arguments are just as unfounded as Sarnoff's and Forster's are. I don't think he really has the grounds to criticize their work given the sweeping generalizations he makes throughout this paper. To even argue the point he is arguing contradicts his own point. As that audience member pointed out in the interview we watched last Tuesday, if the medium is the message what is the point of his writing in this paper? If content has no important bearing on our society, why write anything ever?
The fallacies of his argument actually reveal how important content is to the concept medium as message. In my opinion, content is a huge part of any medium. I believe it can have impacts on the way we think. In the print medium, it is especially the case that if you can't communicate your content effectively your argument falls flat on its face. Without substantial content, no medium can stand.
Content is essential to effective communicative mediums. Samuel Beckett often commented on miscommunication in human society through his short, choppy, often nonsensical and circular dialogue. Plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame. In using this approach, the content embodies the whole point of the medium: communication. Without effective content, communication breaks down.
As my artist inspiration I'll include the following link from the Seinfeld episode "The Puffy Shirt," an episode focused on break downs in communications (a theme the show seems to be obsessed with).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFRoXoh6aks
By exploring miscommunication in its own televisual medium, this episode emphasizes the importance of maintaining clear content in order to take full use of the medium.
Media is the Message Response
Purposes of doing something shape our approaches.
"one African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC, news, even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the presence of those sounds at 7 p.m. each day was important for him."
I was in that African's shoes before. My English teacher told me that the Economist was the best English practice material when I was in middle school, because it uses formal English language and highly advanced vocabulary. In addition, it is said that it was created exclusively to the elites in Britain. However, I hardly understand what it says because I simply do not have that large vocabulary. Nonetheless, I kept reading everyday. It just feels so good to be at the edge of social elites and news. It became an appetite.
Personally, I believe that this kind of mental status is a result of self-consolation. People doing similar things, tend to have a feeling of something good, sense of confidence for example. However on the other hand, they do not have immediate negative reciprocity keeping them aware of their ignorance over messages.
"one African who took great pains to listen each evening to the BBC, news, even though he could understand nothing of it. Just to be in the presence of those sounds at 7 p.m. each day was important for him."
I was in that African's shoes before. My English teacher told me that the Economist was the best English practice material when I was in middle school, because it uses formal English language and highly advanced vocabulary. In addition, it is said that it was created exclusively to the elites in Britain. However, I hardly understand what it says because I simply do not have that large vocabulary. Nonetheless, I kept reading everyday. It just feels so good to be at the edge of social elites and news. It became an appetite.
Personally, I believe that this kind of mental status is a result of self-consolation. People doing similar things, tend to have a feeling of something good, sense of confidence for example. However on the other hand, they do not have immediate negative reciprocity keeping them aware of their ignorance over messages.
McLuhan Medium
This reading had various pro cons in my opinion. I felt that McLuhan's article should have been structured chronologically when taking about the significance of technology, to help give the reader a clearer understanding. For this reason I felt his article was all over the place; one moment he's talking about breaking the sound barrier and technology's similar speed in progression and, in the next moment McLuhan's connecting Shakespeare with technology. It was difficult to make such leaps, but I appreciated some of his examples, especially the airplane breaking the sound barrier. Another issue for me was that McLuhan emphasizes how quickly technology takes us into the future, but then equates it to natural resources such as coal and oil; i understand his point in saying technology today is just as essential as these basic natural resources, but it is also somewhat contradictory at the same time for me. Sure we need technology just as much as gas nowadays but their "content"(or medium or w/e the hell he's talking about) is completely different and I don't think that can be completely disregarded. Technology is definitely an extension of the self, but I believe we still don't entirely even know who we are, or how or why we are here for that matter. I believe this ambiguity is what allows McLuhan to say it doesn't matter whether electric light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball games, but having so much emphasis on the medium is really detrimental to the "big picture" in my opinion (and I'm all about the big picture.) Also, I understand how influential cinema was in McLuhan's opinion, but, don't photography, or the telephone for that matter, equally posses whatever "magnificent powers" McLuhan attributed to cinema?
Monday, November 26, 2012
Response to "The medium is the message"
Marshall McLuhan states that “the medium is the message.” A medium can carry content, but it also carries its own “personal and social consequences” which are independent of the content. If that is true, then (ignoring the content) what does the message of a particular medium say? McLuhan provides a slew of analogies to answer this question, few of which are particularly appropriate in my opinion. However, McLuhan also approaches this question by classifying a medium as an “extension of ourselves.” More specifically, all mediums are extensions of our human senses. McLuhan says that our senses “configure the awareness and experience of each one of us.” A medium can be viewed as a way to share, or perhaps consolidate, the awareness of individuals. In this way, a medium has the potential to create a collective awareness out of many individual awarenesses; this is a medium’s message. The radio, for example, is “about” the consolidation of aural awareness. The TV is “about” the consolidation of aural and visual awareness. These mediums affect the very essence of a culture, solely from the exchange of individual experiences. As C.G. Jung says of the effect of the institution of slavery on Roman masters’ psychology, which Mcluhan adapts to describe media, “No one can shield himself from such an influence.”
Cubism and Television
The main idea I take away from McLuhan's essay is what he says in the beginning, that it's what the medium does and is that changes anything, not the content. The content itself is an entirely different thing. In his reference to humanoid machines McLuhan writes that "in terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs" (1). The message "of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs," (1) the content isn't important anymore - or at all, like we thought it was.
I found McLuhan's reference to cubism as announcing that the "medium is the message" interesting. He says that it seizes "on instant total awareness" by dropping the "illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole" (2). When you look at a cubist painting, he seems to be saying, you become much more aware of how you're seeing it as opposed to what you're seeing. For example, this painting by Braque (Violin and Candlestick, 1910) is just a painting of that - a violin and candlestick.
What you're seeing is not important, or interesting. What is interesting and compelling about a cubist work of out is how you're seeing it - through its medium.
In the discussion of how you watch something/ through what medium you see it being more important than the content, I think first of TV (which I believe Isabel touched on in her post). People watch so much TV (whether they're really trying to or not, I think) that it's gone beyond the influence of content. There's so much content that how can you determine what is the most influential?
On the other hand the fact that people are spending all their time watching TV in some way, or not watching TV (saying "I don't own a television" is never taken as a casual statement, it always provokes some response because TV is such a part of our lives either way) that the action of absorbing TV and having its presence or non-presence a factor in your life effects everything; effects how businesses run (advertising, for ex.) and communication (bonding over what you saw on TV last night, old ex. "watercooler" conversations).
I think it's so interesting that most of the time we attribute the influence of TV and film, and other media images to the content, the stories and the brains and faces behind them, when it's really the TV box sitting in our room that is projecting the most power over us. Content doesn't really matter at all!
I found McLuhan's reference to cubism as announcing that the "medium is the message" interesting. He says that it seizes "on instant total awareness" by dropping the "illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole" (2). When you look at a cubist painting, he seems to be saying, you become much more aware of how you're seeing it as opposed to what you're seeing. For example, this painting by Braque (Violin and Candlestick, 1910) is just a painting of that - a violin and candlestick.
What you're seeing is not important, or interesting. What is interesting and compelling about a cubist work of out is how you're seeing it - through its medium.
In the discussion of how you watch something/ through what medium you see it being more important than the content, I think first of TV (which I believe Isabel touched on in her post). People watch so much TV (whether they're really trying to or not, I think) that it's gone beyond the influence of content. There's so much content that how can you determine what is the most influential?
On the other hand the fact that people are spending all their time watching TV in some way, or not watching TV (saying "I don't own a television" is never taken as a casual statement, it always provokes some response because TV is such a part of our lives either way) that the action of absorbing TV and having its presence or non-presence a factor in your life effects everything; effects how businesses run (advertising, for ex.) and communication (bonding over what you saw on TV last night, old ex. "watercooler" conversations).
I think it's so interesting that most of the time we attribute the influence of TV and film, and other media images to the content, the stories and the brains and faces behind them, when it's really the TV box sitting in our room that is projecting the most power over us. Content doesn't really matter at all!
Sarnoff vs. McLuhan
Though McLuhan strongly disagrees with him, I actually connected with General David Sarnoff's statement that "the products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value". For years I've read stories whose main message is a warning toward its readers about the dangers of technology on society and societal values; Ray Bradbury is the first author that comes to mind when I think of critics of vastly expansive technology. True, perhaps certain kinds of technology have made us increasingly antisocial and non-verbal, but that's only because people have used them to isolate themselves from other people. The people are the ones who wield power over technology, over the medium; it all depends on how they use it. For example, some people choose to use television to air mind-numbing programs that require no thought and no energy. However, other people use television to air informative programs, programs that require you to use your brain to process the information that you've just learned. Even programs like game shows such as Jeopardy challenge you to think. It's all about how you use the medium, and I don't agree with McLuhan's ludicrous way of comparing Sarnoff's statement to chicken pox, or apple pie. If the subject of Sarnoff's statement is about science and modern technology, how could you possibly twist his words into an analogy about disease or food? To me it just didn't make much sense. As a matter of fact, McLuhan directly contradicts Sarnoff's own words with this quote, in which he tries applying Sarnoff's statement to firearms:
"Again, 'Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.' That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube tires the right ammunition at the right people it is good."
Sarnoff isn't trying to make a direct claim that the products of modern science are either specifically good or specifically bad; he's trying to claim that the value of these products is judged upon how we use them. Nothing is ever simply "good" or "bad"- it's not that black and white, and I believe that is the point that Sarnoff was trying to get across. Is it narcissistic to believe we are always in total control? Maybe, but then again, we are the ones who create the medium itself.
I don't have any sort of video or picture to go along with my post, I just thought I'd provide somewhat of a counter-argument to some of McLuhan's thoughts.
"Again, 'Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.' That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube tires the right ammunition at the right people it is good."
Sarnoff isn't trying to make a direct claim that the products of modern science are either specifically good or specifically bad; he's trying to claim that the value of these products is judged upon how we use them. Nothing is ever simply "good" or "bad"- it's not that black and white, and I believe that is the point that Sarnoff was trying to get across. Is it narcissistic to believe we are always in total control? Maybe, but then again, we are the ones who create the medium itself.
I don't have any sort of video or picture to go along with my post, I just thought I'd provide somewhat of a counter-argument to some of McLuhan's thoughts.
The Medium is the Message
This article presents on of the core tenants of both art and digital media, and has become one of the most prolific phrases in media based professions across the nation. "The Medium is the Message" was actually the entirety of the class that every film, broadcast, and journalism student has to take at BU at the beginning of their freshman year. This idea applies to this class in particular because we had adapt our message to each medium we were exploring. The most striking difference between the projects we did for the performance piece and the narrative were the messages that we were trying to convey. Clearly this shows that each medium is suited for a certain kind of message. It would have been difficult to elicit the same response using the same basic concept from our sound projects if we had decided to instead have that project be entirely video based. Similarly, certain books are much better than the film adaptations because it is much more palatable to read a character's existential inner-monologue than to have actors clumsily blurt it out at you. That is one of the most frustrating limitations of film, and if you haven't seen Cloud Atlas, there is no film better suited to prove my point. I've put a link to a clip from the film Adaptation. This movie is a fictional account of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's attempt to adapt Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief, which, according to the film, was a novel that was impossible to adapt.
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