Sunday, April 12, 2015

The Medium is the Message Yukun Liu

Medium is the message is a phrase coined by McLuhan. In my opinion, the important part is how medium shows the message in its own way. Like McLuhan said, the message from movie as a medium is “by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure”, the transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations”. He states that even “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence”. There are two good examples today, Weibo and Instagram. 
Weibo is a Chinese micro blogging website. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China. Weibo successfully gathered all kinds of information to a single stage. This communication technology let ordinary information gets more attentions and most possible transmission. Unlike Twitter, Weibo is more like a blog for people, not focus on celebrities but ordinary people. It’s because existing of medium that information can be transmitted. And we can understand it as with the improvement of medium, information can spread better. 
As an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, Instagram has quickly gone from a trendy IOS only app to a massive social network with Android and web presence and hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. We consider Instagram as a medium because it let people interact with each other. The followers also function kind of like a cheering squad. It’s vicarious and codependent living at its best and worst simultaneously. When more and more people start using Instagram, the photos that posted by the user have its own identities. These following features and the photos are the messages passed by the medium. Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjsoo4RbQ9Y

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