The Medium is the Message

"Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." - I appreciate this sarcastic reversal of Sarnoff's statement. Many people do not appreciate the medium as a necessary part of the message even for gun use. The gun has the capability. Just like words have a certain capability, as does photographs. If a person makes a video of photographs, it is a lot different than if the medium were people.

Another aspect of the article that I appreciated is it talking about people viewing the progress of the final product. We do not aptly do this unless something is produced instantly. From interpretation of these parts of the article, I can conclude that it is important to slow down your art. It is also important to slow down the way that you use your medium.

For these arguments however, I feel that they usually evolve into the author criticizing modern society's inability to understand what they are viewing, such as what McLuhan attempted to do by citing Shakespeare's quotes. I think that we shouldn't be criticizing our ways of instant viewing, but instead taking pride in our technologies ability to evolve. There is a lot of art that has been able to be included in the type of art that we view because of these fast processes. For the viewing part of my response, I am including a youtube video that is talking about the medium as the message in a critical way. I think that by viewing this video, it helps to develop a little bit more of a personal perception of what the medium as the message entails.

The Medium is the Message

McLuhan is clearly in favor of media studies being understood as a study of medium itself, rather than what a medium may convey, but he seems torn, on occasion, about the way he values certain mediums, and whether contemporary modern electric mediums don't represent some kind of "threat".

McLuhan writes, about halfway through the selected section, that "the American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology." Obviously, McLuhan's contemporary "electric technology" was the television, and in some ways much more divorced from literacy than what we see as the forefront of electric technology today, but the quote still seems disingenuous. Even if they're part of what the medium "conveys" through programming, television still represents the mediums of speech and text, and in the case of Closed Captioning and consumers who might need it to experience the medium, it's an essential part of the medium of television, with no relevance to the conveyance.

The video below isn't so much related to this quote as it is to the general perception of McLuhan, but this clip from Annie Hall -- featuring Marshall McLuhan -- is an interesting example of the way people misperceive McLuhan's work, featuring both the movie patron in line, and more metatextually, Woody Allen, as a director.

Medium is the Message (Zoe)

I enjoyed reading this passage because I’ve heard the famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” many times without really knowing what that means. The statement itself seems absolutely ludicrous, and after reading the passage I feel I understand the argument (I think I understand the argument...), but do not completely agree. 

On page three McLuhan comments on a quote by Sarnoff, “the products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” McLuhan then brings up multiple examples such as an apple pie, small-pox virus, and firearms to make his point that the nature of objects do not change with how they are used. This is just ludicrous. Apple pies are not inherently good, especially if you give one to someone who’s allergic to apples. Small-pox is not inherently bad because it can be used to make a vaccine. And firearms can be either good or bad depending on what or who is hit. How humans interact with a medium distinctly alters the message that the medium delivers.

However, in some cases, such as in McLuhan’s example of cubism, his famous statement seems correct. As he writes, “For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of view” or facet of perspective illusion.” The art of cubist painters is an exploration in the medium, and therefor “the medium is the message.” Or perhaps when combined with the analysis in the previous paragraph, the medium CAN be the message. 

I decided to post the credits to wall-e because I think it complicates the McLuhan's definition of medium. In the clip, video is remediating different styles of art from cave painting to video-games. When mediums represent other mediums, does it alter the message? Does straight video say something different than video representing italian renaissance paintings? 

The Medium is the Message

Even though this term was briefly introduced to us before in one of our assigned readings, I wasn't clearly sure what Marshall McLuhan meant. After reading this excerpt from his book I finally kind of understood what he meant by "the medium is the message". Well, in introducing this phrase, McLuhan is basically implying that the medium, not the content is what matters for it is the medium that shapes, forms and produces the content. And this did not made any sense at all until he used the General David Sarnoff's phrase as an example to explain it: "The products of modern science are not in themselves good nor bad, it is the way it is used that determines its value". And this statement got me into thinking there are certain things in this world that are just simply bad regardless of whichever context they are used on. For instance, any disease, which he mentions, can't be perceived as a positive thing. I don't think there could be anyone who is happy to get terminal cancer or perhaps HIV and therefore, there is no good in it. People who suffer from diseases like the ones previously mentioned and survive usually feel situations like this made them stronger and better humans. But that does not mean that the value of cancer or HIV is a good one. As a Christian I can strongly assure I  could ever say the devil is neither good or bad simply because of my beliefs. And so in going through these thoughts made me realize that statement is most times irrelevant or wrongly applied. I am quite sure that in some cases it can be correctly utilized but by specifying that in this world there are things that are just bad and things that are just good, the statements loses credibility. So after more carefully analyzing this statement I began to wonder whether the medium is really what is more important and kind of found myself remembering the installation chapter where the context started to become the content. And it kind of does make sense. Just like in the installation chapter the way in which an art piece is presented affects the way we perceive it and therefore it is not only about the piece itself,  but also about the way it is presented. Same happens with this phrase: it is now not about the message, but instead about the medium a person chooses to deliver the message with, because in choosing it, the person knows the benefits, limitations and troubles of using that medium.

Here is a video of mad men where this phrase is used:

The Medium is The Message

At first, I wasn't quite clear with the concept of "the Medium is the Message"; but after reading this article, I was convinced with what Marshall McLuhan referred in the passage, though not absolutely agreed with, at least worthy of attention.
I 'm pretty interested in the part that he talked about the "medium" brought out by the new technology and how they affect the world because the new technological invention can be directly perceived  through out senses. Railways and airplanes are mediums that bring out new living patterns and those are "messages".
The most direct way that "the Medium is the Message" makes sense to we is that in last a few days there were big incidents happening both in US and my country China: Boston had the Marathon Bombing, 3 dead and hundreds injured; China had the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 160 lives and more than 2000 injured. In both incidents, people receive the fastest information from the internet instead of the traditional medium. The internet and the invention of social networking website gives pressure to the traditional medium since it changes the way how we get used to receive information; we are not satisfied by the way we receive news as before, and the change of technology and our demand force it to improve again, that process happens interchangeably, so "the Medium is the Message".

Here is a short video from google introducing the data of people using mobile now. "Mobile is so big. It's changing and creating new customer behaviors. Mobile is entertaining us in new ways."We are spoiled by the convenience it brought to us and it is forced to be more perfect. Message is the ways and patterns that it brings to us, which still holds Marshall Mcluhan's idea from long time ago.

Is the medium really the message?

I'll come right out and say that I don't completely buy McLuhan's assertion. He seems obsessed with industrialization and links the specificity of transportation to art. I don't disagree that the railway "accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions," but an artistic medium is different from an industrial process. In arguing that the medium is the message, I feel that McLuhan is overly homogenizing entire styles of art. If the content is just the distracting juicy piece of meat that he asserts it is, why bother making new art? Such an emphasis on form over content devalues the artist and overvalues the engineer or inventor who creates new forms of artistic expression. Different artists utilize a given medium in very different ways, even within similar schools of thought (e.g.: the French New Wave).
McLuhan argues that "the effect of the movie form is not related to its program content." However, I don't quite understand what he means by "movie form." Does he mean to assert that any series of images projected in front of a lightbulb on a moving strip of images is essentially the same? One only needs to juxtapose the work of Bela Tarr and Sergei Eisenstein to realize the absurdity of such an assertion. Film can explore time and space, but also can sacrifice either notion for the other or lose track of both. Stan Brakhage's more abstract pieces (those that involve directly painting on strips of film) illustrate this point. Below I've included a clip from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies and Eisenstein's October, just to illustrate two very different filmic experiences. Even more different might have been a clip from a Tarkovsky film, but I just really love the opening scene to Werckmeister Harmonies.

Unless You Will

Here is the link to the Unless You Will website, an intriguing online magazine published bi-monthly. And here is a link to the blog. More amazing photos.