Sometimes I feel like just walking out on my life - again

[LHX]

some would disagree...

[Jasper]

Does medium imply content?

[LHX]

media shapes content


what is internet telling you right now?

[Thurnez Isa]

to be fair to the late McLuhan
what he was saying was a generic form of mass media was in fact more important then any message it is trying to convey
in his world the content is the viewer himself
best let Wiki explain

In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan turned his attention to analyzing and commenting on numerous examples of persuasion in contemporary popular culture. This followed naturally from his earlier work as both dialectic and rhetoric in the classical trivium aimed at persuasion. At this point his focus shifted dramatically, turning inward to study the influence of communication media independent of their content. His famous slogan, "the medium is the message" (elaborated in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) calls attention to this intrinsic impact of communications media. (It should be noted that he titled his later, 1967, book The Medium is the Massage.) The slogan, "the medium is the message," is best understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.[18]

the sad thing is his ideas on were popular culture and mass media was going to take us is more relevant today as it was in the 60's

dare you to turn on CNN, or, if your feeling really brave, FOX News

[Thurnez Isa]

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.[23]

McLuhan's theory was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the lighbulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[28] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society –- in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example -– the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Wake represent different stages in the history of man:[32] Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals. Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression. Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life. Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power. Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors. Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism. Thunder 7: Tribal man again. Both all choractors end of separate, private man. Return of choric. Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound. Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death. Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. Last thunder = turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

[Jasper]

media shapes content


what is internet telling you right now?

The point of media is to decode intended meaning.  The medium is a clue, but not the message itself.  Media is form, content is function.  It really takes an artist for both to work in the same direction.

[LHX]

media shapes content


what is internet telling you right now?

The point of media is to decode intended meaning.  The medium is a clue, but not the message itself.  Media is form, content is function.  It really takes an artist for both to work in the same direction.

i had to read that about 4 times, but its actually a really good post


pretend i am gonna attack you from the 'what is the point of discussing that abstract nonsense' angle -

how do you make that observation pertinent and practical?

(because it is a good summary of a sharp observation)

[Jasper]

The upshot of that last post is that you can't encode your messages carelessly (the obvious part), and that the medium you choose is always a part of what you say and you must always keep in mind not to whisper through a megaphone.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm a free spirit - get me out of here!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!