Christian Cieri - Medium is the Message

As a Digital Media Studies major, I was forced to take DMS 101 here, which is entitled Introduction to Media Studies. I had to read countless essays and articles written about media, and I distinctly remember reading Mcluhan’s argument on media being the message. At first I really didn’t understand it, and honestly I’m still a bit confused on it, but to the best of my abilities I have tried to figure it out. The conclusion I’ve come to is that what a medium contains is information found within a message, which is the media. According to Mcluhan these are separate things, and they don’t involve one another, which I can agree with to some extent, but I do find issue with. As a fan of musical theatre, I’ve seen many live stage shows of musicals, and their respective movie adaptations. Often times, with a few rare exceptions, the movie versions are almost always different, and cut things out, or restructure important elements of the show to fit the film. Here is where I diverge from Mcluhan’s argument; the information of the medium, the musical itself, is adapted between its two different media (film and stage). So, in a sense, the message/medium is crucial in defining what the information is, even when the information is the same between two media. It changes.

I also really enjoyed Mcluhan’s argument about sports being a form of controlled violence, because essentially that’s what it is; violence. His last statement on the subject matter that sports would be meaningless without an audience truly resonated with me, because as someone who does not enjoy watching or playing sports, they truly have no meaning for me.

To touch back on what I was speaking about with musical adaptations being changed over media, I’d like to present a perfect example of this occurring. My favorite musical, Little Shop of Horrors, premiered Off-Broadway in 1982, and in the end of the musical all the lead actors die. When the show was adapted into a film in 1986, the ending was scrapped and the two lead actors lived, producing a happy ending. This was all done because when the show transitioned to film, the main character was made more sympathetic, and the text audiences did not want him or his love interest to die. So the happy ending was filmed, but only because the original ending did not work in the context of the new media; the film.

Here’s a link to the happy ending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtJtYayW4VQ

And here’s a link to the original ending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RjFvcw6ToQ

Finally here’s a link to director Frank Oz talking about the ending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsWgcZkFxCw

Danielle Rennalls: Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message was a very rough reading with very hard concepts to grasp. His chapter on Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man states various concepts and ideas concerning different media that he categorizes into two subgroups (cold media or hot media), not solely based on how the material is being presented but based on how users react to the material itself. However, through the development and advancement of technology, some of McLuhan’s concepts regarding various media such as photography, has been outdated, for though McLuhan’s concepts and ideas remain unchanged, the world around us is constantly evolving and ultimately so is media.

Categorizing media into subgroups like that of McLuhan’s is one that will need constant revising and editing. For as time changes, so does our interactions with media, how we preserve them and how they impact us. Take for instance photography. McLuhan refers to photography as a hot medium, which he defines to be mechanical, the expansion of space, low in audience participation, exclusive and detribalizing. These various definitions and categorizing of hot medium may have worked well for photography back in McLuhan’s time, however in this time period photography is far less mechanical and exclusive than he describes it to be. In this day in age, taking a photograph no longer requires a professional but can be done by an ordinary, unprofessional, inexperience person. Moreover, almost all people today have a device readily on hand that can capture an image, illustrating that photography is more inclusive. Furthermore, McLuhan’s concepts limit photography to low audience participation, which in 2015 is quite an inadequate categorization. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY

McLuhan response-Anna L.

The key argument that McLuhan posits, the straightforward title “The Medium is the Message,” confuses many people as in evident in the some people’s responses from his interview- the importance/relevance of content is questioned and one woman pointedly asked what the point would be to the interview, or even to her asking the question. McLuhan responded saying that his argument does not suggest that the content is itself worthless, but that rather that content is contained within the construct of the medium, which comparably has a much greater ruling effect. I think the weakness of this interview is that he fails to outline in concrete terms what effects he is concerned about, other than a “shift in awareness” from literacy. From reading this chapter in Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, I found a couple other common themes. One is that he criticizes that TV is a numbing nothingness. Also, I think it is interesting to consider how community works with TV because McLuhan also critiques it for creating isolation; but in another sense, if large amounts of people are tuning in to watch a specific event it creates community collapsing the importance of distance.  I think a lot of this reading is difficult to sort through because it feels antiquated when McLuhan uses the advent of print and electricity as points of comparison. If he mistrusted the impacts of television on society so much, who knows what he would think of the internet today. His point that it takes a long time to accurately analyze these effects is valid. 

It seems to me that a medium, or any user-interface design, is most successful when it appears to be effortless. As a consumer, I want to be drawn into the story/argument. As Whitney has mentioned in class, even with abstract themes work that takes you elsewhere is the most successful. We often take this reality for granted which is perhaps why McLuhan’s argument of the medium’s paramount significance important is startling.

            In terms of examples, while someone already presented on Nam June Paik, I thought of his work that included the “map” of televisions because it comments how the medium itself functions across the country- Electronic Superhighway, http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=71478. 

           I also looked at Video Tape Study No. 3 because it uses distorted television footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EECKIAHJUlk 

The Medium is the Message - Aisyah

     In Marshall Mcluhan's lecture, The Medium is the Message, he touches upon a number of interesting points for discussion with regards to understanding why we live the way we do, or understanding the ways of society itself. He is concerned with all types of medium, especially the electronic medium such as radio and television, as he sees them as "an extension of our central nervous system" and argues that they lead to "electrical tribalization  of the West".

     One of the first things he talked about was literacy. As a form of awareness, it is a highly specialist and objective sort of thing. A literate person can stand back and view situations in an objective manner. However, a television person has no objectivity because television is subjective and totally involving.  I guess in terms of understanding the ways of society and why we live the way we do, I see why Mcluhan talks about television this way. If we are constantly watching television, it is easy for us to be influenced by the ways that society is portrayed, especially since we can see it visually. They portray value judgements, which are subjective because they are so personal. However, what I don't understand is why radio people would be far more literate than television people. Aren't radios subjective, too? I'm not too sure how radios were like back in the days, but I'd imagined that before podcasts were out, people used radios for entertainment just as we do with television. Would they not portray some forms of value judgements (news cast, music stations, etc)? I just find it interesting that both radio and television are the same forms of medium for entertainment, yet one is said to be more subjective than the other.

     What I really liked during this part of the discussion was Mcluhan's explanation of reading. He talks about how any word has so many meanings and to select one meaning in the context of other words requires rapid guessing, to make decisions really fast. This ties in well to the fact that value judgments confuses people a lot (as discussed in the lecture).

   Another thing that interested me during the discussion was the topic of advertising and commercials. Mcluhan explains that adverts are a very great art form. They are not private, but corporate. The advertiser's main goal is to make an effect in capturing our attentions. This can be said with any artists, too — they set a "trap" for our attention. A great question that was brought up in this part of the conversation was whether Mcluhan believes the "masterpieces" or popular ads of the present time will still be as popular in the coming years. Mcluhan replied with, "We'll know better in 50 years." This made me giggle, but he does have a point. It is hard to distinguish whether an advert, or any sort of artwork (if that's the right way to put it?) will still gain the same amount, or more, interests and attentions in the future. We don't have a criteria in measuring popularity, and I believe it's because popularity is subjective. Take for example this 1970 Coca-Cola ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1NeogMh1JI At the time, it might have been popular amongst the viewers, but if it was aired now it would not have caught a lot of people's attentions for a number of reasons. Firstly, we are so used to the technology we have that enables us to create more crisp, HD videos. We also implement a lot of cuts/jump cuts in advertising just so that the viewers can get a fresh scene every time. In this 1970 advert, the advertiser used a lot of long takes and cross-dissolve/cross-fade transitions between the footage so the pacing feels a lot slower. As a comparison, watch this 2014 Coca-Cola ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUzPwIP9BqE There are more cuts between scenes in this video, and other elements that are used to keep the viewers interested.

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