The Medium is the Message response

         I think that McLuhan’s claim that the “‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” is pretty well-understood by readers of the modern age. It looks like the book this excerpt is from was published in 1964, a year in an interesting era for the movies and television. In the movie industry, films in the 1960s and ‘70s were just exiting the dominance of the Classical Hollywood style that focused on narrative, good triumphing over evil, and continuous time. Films in the Hollywood Renaissance started to acknowledge the constructedness of the medium (which de-prioritized the narrative), often had uncertain, irresolute endings and started breaking away from the linear structure of older films. The breakdown of structure is often at least partly attributed to the social and political context in which these films were made, in the midst of Vietnam and the various political scandals and riots occurring in the United States. At the same time, the film medium itself changed, with the advent of smaller and more portable cameras that aided the spread of observational documentary. The simplification of filming also meant that non-professionals could take to the streets with cameras, spreading the technology to the masses. I think these points are relevant to McLuhan’s piece about the medium being the message because these bits of history show that the changes in the style of film and in the creation of it reflect the upheavals reverberating through society at the time, and have themselves affected the way we think of film. For example, it’s no longer a given that movies will avoid breaking the fourth wall, or that the main character will always survive; we just can’t imagine that to be real anymore because film has restructured itself that way. It’s interesting to consider whether that means we as a society see life and social relations as more fragmented or if they actually are more fragmented.

        This reading made me think of two different things, one a scientific study and the other a video. A study was conducted in May 2003 by C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavalier of the University of Rochester (!) examining the effects of videogame playing on subjects’ visual attention. They found that videogame players had higher attentional capacity in that, compared to non-gamers: they can group objects (like numbers) together more efficiently so they can remember more of them, they can unerringly apprehend a higher number of visual items, they have an enhanced allocation of spatial attention all over the visual field, and have higher task-switching abilities. Additionally, and this is what I find most interesting: training non-gamers on an action game increased the capacity of their visual attention, spatial distribution, and temporal resolution (task-switching). This study goes to show that the different way of spreading attention that videogame playing requires does in fact change the way we perceive the world. It’s, in my opinion, a perfect complement to McLuhan’s assertion that “the effects of technology…alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” 

        I also thought about a video from The Onion where panelists can see audience reactions to what they say in real time, so they adjust accordingly. Not only is it amusing, it goes to show that the instant-ification of the way we get our news changes what kind of news we get and how we interpret that news.