Be Specific About Books Concering The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
| Original Title: | The Medium is the Massage |
| ISBN: | 188886902X (ISBN13: 9781888869026) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Marshall McLuhan
Paperback | Pages: 160 pages Rating: 3.94 | 13310 Users | 415 Reviews
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This was a much more interesting read than I suspected it would be before I started. The argument runs a bit like this:Every technology only makes sense in as far as it extends a human sense or ability. The car makes us better ‘walkers’. The telephone, for example, could be seen as a much-improved human ear, allowing us to hear across continents or a plough a much-improved human hand, allowing us to dig up an entire field. Stick with this idea for a moment and soon we see that we have used technology to turn ourselves into gods. One of my favourite examples being Hermes, the messenger god, who Homer tells us could run swifter than the wind. Now, when I am finished with this review it could potentially be read by millions of people all over the planet within moments of my clicking Save – Hermes has nothing on modern technology. I now have a voice (continuing the metaphor of the technologically extended human body) loud enough to ring out across the entire planet – whereas, in announcing the death of Pan all the gods could muster was a voice to boom out across the waves toward a single boat.
Now, a human with a voice that can travel at the speed of light across the entire planet, and a fire stick that can set fire in an instant to an entire city or, with enough such atomic weapons, potentially end all life on the planet, is a substantially different beast to that human’s hunter-gatherer ancestors. Not only can such a human transform the environment in ways a hunter-gatherer could never dream of doing, but this human will also be transformed in turn by the sheer power of their new found limbs, their new found abilities, their new found super-powers. For much of human history we have wondered what it must be like to fly, what it must be like to see what is happening through walls and what it must be like to run faster than a cheetah. All of which are such commonplaces today they have become too trivial to really rate a mention.
And yet we rarely ask ourselves just what these new and impressive powers have done to our conceptions of ourselves.
If language and communication are fundamental attributes that help to define what it is to be human then how communication has changed ought to also help change our perception of how we define ourselves. There are clear stages in the development of human communication and these are related to the senses that have been heightened and made more powerful by the application of new technologies. The difference between a culture that must rely on the oral transmission of data, compared to one that can rely on a written technology is substantial. It is a standard trope now to quote Socrates’ concerns with writing (and that is done once again in this text) but perhaps his is a point that cannot really be made too often – no new technology comes without some costs and writing cost us our memories. When the eye becomes an ear the need for a perfect ear diminishes. If anything McLuhan does not really go far enough here. As Luria points out in Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, access to literacy is not a minor matter of just undermining our memories, but rather it fundamentally changes our abilities to categorise knowledge, think syllogistically (or sequentially) and (not to put too fine a point on it) think logically.
We trust our eyes more than we trust our ears – and this is interesting, particularly in the move from the print obsessed world toward out new obsession with television images. Television can’t really cope very well with words – even dialogue in dramas is pared back to a minimum, and drama on television is not at all like drama in a theatre. When plays are shown on television they appear ‘wrong’, they seem very stodgy and even bloated. Television has moved the eye back from being an ear to once again being an eye, but a terrifyingly all seeing eye (at least, seemingly so). Ezra Pound said poetry was really about capturing images (and written text, we often forget, is a visual medium, not really an aural one), but this obsession with images seems to reach its peak with television.
The book and the framed picture were interesting moments in the technological development of human culture – prior to the book (as made available by Herr Gutenberg) there really weren’t what we would today call ‘authors’. Texts often did not have single authors and those that clearly did often were not even ‘signed’. But the commoditisation of works – including art works getting frames – meant an interesting dialectical process was put in train. On the one hand the individual was asserted, as author, painter, creator – and on the other the individual lost some of their individuality. This was because they had to subsume themselves in their text so as to allow that text to be read, universally, that is, by anyone (McLuhan makes this clear in his discussing of the role of perspective in Renaissance art – in looking at such a painting you are affectively being told 'you will stand here, this is what you will see'). The placement of the viewer as a universal viewer, the placement of the writer as a universal voice is the opposite movement from our obsession with the individual author or artist in much of the modern world – think Shakespeare or Caravaggio.
What is really interesting in this is the move away from ‘authored’ works that the new media present us with today and which McLuhan saw coming. My favourite example of this at the moment is Wikipedia. It is a text that is not really ‘authored’ in the traditional sense – there is no single author even of a single article – but the fact of its existence is undeniable and not only is the question of who authored any part of Wikipedia of little interest, it is mostly beside the point.
Too extreme an example? Well, what about a television show? Who is the author here? Is it the scriptwriter? The director? The producer? The television network that commissioned the series? The actors? Although we may talk of a Kubrick film or even a David Lynch television series, these seem exceptions to us today - where 'from the makers of' often makes me think the new film simply won't be nearly as good as the previous effort - a response learnt from aversion therapy. Film is collaboration – the medium is not as individual or isolated as the authoring of a novel or the painting of a painting once was.
One of the things I’ve taken to doing lately – and I regret it, as I’m sure time spent reading newspapers is mostly time wasted – is reading articles from The Age, The Guardian and The Washington Post every day. What is always a surprise is how similar these three news sources from three continents are in what they presented as ‘news’. McLuhan refers to this as the global village – and this, too, would seem a difficult conclusion to argue with. The value of the information we receive in the marketplace of this village may be of questionable worth, but that we are feed the same diet of high fat, low-nutrient guff right across the globe is certainly not questionable.
McLuhan’s main point is that the guff that comes at us via the new media is determined by the preferred style of that new media and how this new media works. His classic phrase, the medium is the message, is to the point here. The medium gets us to respond to the world in a new way, and how we respond to the world mediated via that medium is much more interesting than any of the individual ‘messages’ we think we are responding to.
This really is an interesting little book. It is almost a series of aphorisms (although, some of the aphorisms stretch over a couple of pages, but often not) made explicit by some remarkably interesting and illuminating images - a bit like a Bird Brian review. There are times when what McLuhan has to say seems frighteningly prescient (given that this was written in the early 1960s). Particularly when he talks about individuals being given the power to self-publish – and if that isn’t what the Internet does, it is hard to know what it does do.
So, over all, a remarkably interesting and remarkably short text.
Details Epithetical Books The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
| Title | : | The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects |
| Author | : | Marshall McLuhan |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 160 pages |
| Published | : | December 1st 1996 by Hardwired (first published 1967) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Philosophy. Design. Art. Sociology |
Rating Epithetical Books The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Ratings: 3.94 From 13310 Users | 415 ReviewsWrite-Up Epithetical Books The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
I have no idea what this book is aboutAn excellent and very odd book. A review could be written entirely of quotes, which is more or less what I've done below. The essential point of the book is that Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.Quotes from hereThe major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."Come into my parlor, said the computer to the specialist.The alphabet and print
I had a vague idea about what McLuhan wanted to say with this book. It got clearer when I read some of the reviews. But unfortunately it didn't get much clearer by reading the book itself. I find this book a little pretentious, or maybe I just don't 'get it'.Let's start with the last page of the book which is maybe the one that is least cryptic and sums up the main idea of the book. There, under a drawing of a young person talking to his parent, we find following description:"You see, Dad,
Classic pop-theoretical discourse (via kinetic typography and image) on the effects of changing media in the 20th century. Prescient. Perhaps as relevant in today's hyperconnectivity as in the television era of its conception. And with a kind of ambivalence of value that seems appropriate: once technology changes, there's no going back and it may be more useful to "inventory the effects" than to judge or decry.
For a book published 5o years ago, this short book has aged very well (beyond a few references to the technology of the times). Still can't believe that we didn't read this in my graduate program, since so many authors name dropped McLuhan.
Amazing that I did not get around to reading this classic before! But better late than never and it is shocking. Published in 1967 I dare you to find any book whose vision to such an extent heralds and encompasses our current struggles with adapting culture to the speed of digital. Sure McLuhan deals with the 'electrical' media of his time, but his clear analysis makes it easy to extrapolate to the digital age. His insistence that electrical media forces us to live mythically even taps into the
I read this and all of Marshall McLuhan's works decades ago when the ideas were revolutionary and often hard to visualize. Observer's today might find its pages unremarkable, like looking at the splash page of a website. Consider it this way, you open a chest that's been buried since 1967 and find a fully functional smartphone that's very much like an iPhone 5. The smartphone is basic tech compared to what's in your pocket until you realize when it was built.When I first heard of McLuhan using
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