September 26, 2005

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media (1964)

  • “The Medium is the Message”

  • “The personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” (7)

  • “Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs.” (8)

  • “This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, ‘What is the content of speech?,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal. An abstract painting represents direct manipulation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.” (8)

  • “The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical the the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” (9)

  • “For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the ‘point of view’ or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that ‘drives home the message’ by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise painting, not in illusion…In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration?” (13)
  • “The message, it seemed, was the ‘content’, as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about.” (13)

  • “For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is mafe strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’. The content of a movie is a novel or play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The ‘content’ of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.” (18)

  • “Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and ‘content’ analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge.” (20)

  • “Media Hot and Cold”

  • “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data…Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information….hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience…A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet.” (22-23)

  • “Reversal of the Overheated Medium”

  • One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded talkies). Today with microfilm and micro-cards, not to mention electric memories, the printed word assumes again much of the handicraft character of a manuscript. But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.” (39)

  • "Media as Translators"

  • Lyman Bryson: “technology is explicitness” (56)

  • “Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered and outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.” (57)

  • "The Spoken Word"

  • “The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically, though highly literate people tend to speak as connectedly and casually as possible.” (78)

  • "The Written Word"

  • Prince Modupe: Printed page is “trapped words…trapped thoughts” (81)

  • “Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio and TV.” (82)

  • “The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.” (83)

  • “The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike.” (85)

  • "The Print"

  • “..the basic function of media—to store and expedite information. Plainly, to store is to expedite, since what is stored is also more accessible than what has to be gathered.” (158)

  • ***p. 160***

  • “The increasing precision and quantity of visual information transformed the print into a three-dimensional world of perspective and fixed point-of-view.” (162)

  • "The Comic"

  • “The comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the world of games, to the world of models and extensions of situations elsewhere.” (169)

  • "The Printed Word"

  • “Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education.” (172)

  • “Psychically, the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform and continuous. The linearity precision and uniformity of the arrangement of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance experience. The intensity of visual stress and private point of view in the first century of printing were united to the means of self-expression made possible by the typographic extension of men.” (172)

  • Detachment and non-involvement through specialization, not roles

  • “Even in the early eighteenth century a ‘textbook’ was still defined as a ‘Classick Author written very wide by the Students to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines’ (O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time in schools and college classrooms was spent in making such texts. The classroom tended to be a scriptorium with a commentary. The student was editor-publisher.” (173)

  • Margaret Mead: brought several copies of the same book to a Pacific island; natives had seen a book, but not multiples—assumed each book was unique; astonishment followed the unveiling of multiple copies.

  • Printing brought homogenization of diverse regions with the resulting amplification of power, energy and aggression that we associate with new nationalisms.

  • Print was mistaken for immortality in the Renaissance; thoughts needed to be committed for future generations.

  • “Once a technology comes into social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” (177)

  • "The Photograph"

  • "For centuries, the woodcut and the engraving had delineated the world by an arrangement of lines and points that had syntax of a very elaborate kind.” (189)

  • Uniformity and repeatability—the two qualities inherent to the break made by the Gutenberg and photography.

  • “In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose ‘meaning’ belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters.” (196)

  • In photography, the “world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects used that have been encountered before in some other medium.” (198)

    i.e. the most photographed barn in the world in DeLillo's White Noise

  • “All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.” (199)

  • "Games"

  • “Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group.” (235)

  • “..all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives.” (238)

  • “Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.” (245)

  • "The Telegraph"

  • 1844: “The original telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington promoted chess games between the experts in the two cities. Other lines were used for lotteries and play in general, just as early radio existed in isolation from any commercial commitments and was, in fact, fostered by amateur ‘hams ‘ for years before it was seized by big interests.”

  • Also in 1844: Kierkegaard publishes The Concept of Dread; McLuhan feels that this is because of the externalization of our nervous system through the telegraphic lines—we had to “shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium.” (252)

  • “By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old, compelled several major American newspapers to form a collective organization for newsgathering” (The AP) (254)

  • “The very nature of the telephone, as all electric media, is to compress and unify that which had previously been divided and specialized. Only the ‘authority of knowledge’ works by telephone because of the speed that created a total and inclusive field of relations.” (255)

  • “All literate people, therefore, experience a desire for an extension of the most enlightened opinions in a uniform horizontal and homogenous pattern to the ‘most backward areas’, and to the least literate minds. The telegraph ended that hope. It decentralized the newspaper so thoroughly that uniform national views were quite impossible, even before the Civil War.” (257)

    Posted by marcusrp at 8:47 PM | Comments (0)

    McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage (1967)

  • Textuality highlighted throughout (p.4, ex)
  • “All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.” (26)
    The wheel is the extension of the foot.
    …book…eye
    …clothing…skin
    …electric circuitry…central nervous system
  • “…the continuum becomes the organizing principle of life.” (45)
    in reference to the discrete, unitary arrangement of the phonetic alphabet
  • Easel paintings = printed book (isolated, individualistic)
    Fixed POV
  • “Art, or the graphic translation of culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived.” (56)
  • “Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multidimensional space orientation of the primitive.” (57)
    i.e. “twists and turns” visual aspects until they reflect what she wishes is represented
  • *** Media content is always another medium (i.e. writing is immaterial thought‡ writing is alphabet‡ printed words are writing, etc.) ***
  • King Cadmus: Words are “dragon’s teeth” that incite the masses, turn peasants into soldiers

    Posted by marcusrp at 8:43 PM | Comments (0)