Monday, November 24, 2014

The Medium is the Message - Response

One question that bothered me about McLuhan’s article is the extent to which the medium and the message are extricable. Clearly, one cannot consider the message without the medium, and oftentimes the medium effects the message, and vice versa. But I am curious about the extent to which this is true. Is the message of a poem read on paper fundamentally different than the same poem read from a screen? The medium has changed, but it is still text, and the message (in my opinion) remains the same. The only change is in how we experience the medium – looking at a screen and scrolling through with a mouse rather than turning pages. One example of a change in medium affecting the experience of the content is kinetic typography, where a sound clip is played and the words move across the screen, often in a way that provides a visual representation of the words. There are two examples below; both are from films. In the Fight Club one, the typography brings the physicality of the words to the forefront; in the movie, there is no real action during the monologue (although there is a lot of tension). In the V For Vendetta monologue, it highlights the most distinctive part of the monologue – the repetition of the letter “v” – although the connection between the meaning of the words and the action we see is not as specific as the Fight Club monologue.
Fight Club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbMa4MGFCOg 
V For Vendetta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otv5ywOa-8U

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