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Understanding Media

What are the media?

If you ask Professor Marshall McLuhan, media are extensions of our senses

[medium, media: technological extensions of our senses, which we use to

communicate.]

All media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical.

The wheel, a medium for transportation, is an extension of the foot.
The book, a medium for communications, is an extension of the eye.
A microphone extends the voice, a radio your ear.
Clothing, in part a form of communication, is an extension of the skin."

McLuhan, a scholar of James Joyce who was fond of puns and poetry, is famous for
saying
“THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE”
"Societies have always been shaped more by
the nature of the media by which men communicate
than by the content of communication."

How has society been shaped more by the communications media?

What’ s been going on since the Stone Age is this:
We shape our tools, and our tools shape us.

Media, by altering the environment, change our balance of sensory perception.

Extending any sense in a different alters the way we perceive the world.
As the barrage of information hitting our various senses change, people change.

We’re now living in the Information Age

(not the Stone Age, not the Industrial Age, not the "post-industrial" age)

Let’s briefly go back, so we can hear where we are today…

[ever wonder why the metaphor is “see” where we are, and gain “perspective”?)

Before the alphabet the dominant sense was the ear.

Hearing was believing.
The educated man was someone who could recite Homer from memory.

Until post-ideographic writing was invented, man lived in circles of acoustic space,
directionless, in the world of emotion, listening for sounds of both beauty and danger,
attuned to primordial intuition.
There were cave drawings and talking heads, but no written words.
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In tribal cultures without written language, notions of time, space and territoriality are
totally different from the Euro-Western tradition. For primitive and pre-alphabet people
time and space are horizonless, boundless, and multi-sensory. The Eskimo drawing of a
man hunting seal on an ice floe shows what is below the ice, as well as what is in view.

Then the phonetic alphabet tilted our sensory ratio to favor the eye.
Oral languages had been like knots.
With written language, chronological, classified, segmented knowledge took over.

The letters of the alphabet are bits and pieces which are meaningless (in terms of
CONTENT) in themselves. But what impact have they had upon us as FORM?

The alphabet combined fragmented bits that must be strung together bead-like in a
line.
It fostered the habit of perceiving our environment in visual terms, a time and space
that are uniform, continuous, and connected.
The line, the continuum, became the organizing principle of life.

The invention of the printing press confirmed and extended visual bias in Western
culture.
It fostered more linear, visual thinking.
It provided the first uniformly repeatable commodity.
It provided the model for the assembly LINE and the mechanical age.
Break everything down into standard component parts led to industrialization.

Did the alphabet, writing, and later the printed word, foster a particular approach to
logic, and the accepted ordering of ideas?
Absolutely! Linear thinking became equated with rationality.
Logic became depending on sequence (from the Latin “sequor” meaning to follow).
"I don't follow you" came to mean "I don’t think what your saying is rational!”
Is the linear, sequential, “rational, logical" viewpoint always the correct path? Quantum
physicists would say “no”, and I suspect some advertising copywriters would agree.

The printed book also contributed to an emerging cult of individualism.

The private, fixed point of view (The Western "I") became possible and literacy
conferred a power of detachment, non-involvement.

Art is shaped by the way space is perceived in a culture.

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Since the renaissance, the Western artist perceived his environment in terms
of a perspective projection upon a plane surface, accepting vertical and horizontal
symmetry as an absolute condition of order. The information age would change all that.

Artists sometimes offer the first examples of a culture's changing sensory perceptions.
Picasso's early style was conventional, paintings of clowns and lovers in the Blue and
Pink periods. 1906-13 it changed: he abandoned the fixed perspective that had
dominated painting; "cubism" brought in many different vantage points, all angles at
once, all on the canvas at the same instant.

At an accelerating pace over the last one hundred and fifty years, new communications
media have continuously reshaped our sensory environment: still photography, the
telegraph, motion pictures, the telephone, several generations of sound recording
technology, radio, the talkies, television, instant and color photography, transistor radio,
videotape, satellite communications, broadband, photocopy, fax machines, telephone
answering machines, beepers, portable phones, computers, laptops, modems, e-mail
and the internet, fiber optic broadband networks, digital imaging, data compression and
digital storage media, wireless appliances and hybrids of these media.

Professor McLuhan, who died in 1980, predicted that the electronic communications
media of our age would retribalize our culture drastically altering our sense ratios in a
way which could reverse the effects of the phonetic alphabet.

Our new languages are simultaneous, interrelated, visceral, intuitive, and

participatory (so the audience makes the connections). The "logic" of these languages
can be circular, free-associating, discontinuous (i.e. without verbal road signs such
as "and", "but", "because"), non-linear and out of sequence.

For instance, the film artist's vocabulary today includes not only the editorial twisting of
time, lenses and special effects warping space, and three dimensional sound, but also
computer flight simulators and early forms of virtual reality that will some day give us
interactions like those seen on Star Trek’s holodeck.

New media are new languages.

In the 1950s McLuhan’s associate, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter said:

"English is a mass medium. All languages are mass media.
The new mass media--film, radio, TV--are new languages, their grammars yet unknown.
Each codifies reality differently."
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Just as we learned oral languages as children, we've also learned the
symbol systems of other media. Why are fast commercials, phone machines,
computerized bankbooks and e-mail are so horrifying to most 90 yr old grannies?
Because they never learned the languages!

McLuhan asks four questions to clarify the nature & impact of a medium-
1. What does enhance or amplify in the culture?
2. What does it obsolesce or push out of prominence?
3. What does retrieve from the past, from the realm of the previously obsolesced?
4. What doees the medium reverse flip into when it reaches the limits of its potential?”

Becoming conversant about mass media is an important mark of an educated person

today, and much of our ongoing education requires learning new media. The first to
understand the vocabulary of a new medium can be the first to profit from it. But yet
newer media can reverse these advantages. And because the audience is constantly
being reshaped (“we shape our tools, and our tools shape us”) communicators must
constantly make adjustments. Some examples:

 Martin Luther understood that the Gutenberg Bible had decentralized access to the
"word of God". Translating it into vernacular German, he enabled laymen to read the
Scriptures, undermining the authority of the priesthood. This was a major factor in the
Protestant Reformation.

 The inventors of MTV understood that a speeded-up, non-linear, discontinuous, multi-

sensory vocabulary had already been taught to a generation through commercials, who
could easily decode a full-time channel in this language. (They also understood that the
recording industry would provide the programming for free. Ironically, twenty years
later, digital file sharing threatens to make all music content free to everyone via
piracy.)

 The computer graphics vocabulary of recent motion pictures is reshaping the syntax
of the next generation of movie-goers, much as television commercials reshaped the
sensibilities of the first generation to grow up on TV, fifty years ago. Remember,
McLuhan didn’t advocate these changes as a good thing – he simply encouraged us to
note them..

Now, besides giving us new languages to learn, what else have these new media
wrought on our culture? Let’s take a quick inventory of some characteristics and
effectsof the electronic media. Exactly how has our world been transformed?
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WE LIVE IN AN INSTANTANEOUS INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

The electronic communications media of our time...television, radio, computers...have
certain characteristics diametrically opposed to those of print:

 Communication is Instantly Everywhere [in print the deal was "we haven't heard
from Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in Paris this year...we should write him a letter"]

 In a world of instantaneous communications, we live in a GLOBAL VILLAGE. [Seems

obvious now, but it wasn’t when McLuhan published the Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962]

 Information overload. When information comes at us from many different sources,

it's like an "implosion" a barrage of images and sounds. Sensory overload can often
result.
Invididuals must become adept at using technology to help us sort and select
information.
Communicators need increasingly distinctive imagery, humor, and unique
environments to break through.

 When information moves a electronic speeds, it changes

Details become blurred and disappear.
Causes and effects are time-compressed, appearing simultaneous, condensing into
patterns.
Pattern recognition becomes a valuable resource, so those who best use technology to
crunch detailed data become leaders (e.g etailers like WalMart, or programmed traders
in the investment community)
We must now pay attention to reaction, as well as action, knowing in advance the
consequences of policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay.
[Instant Replays, corporate scandals] Contingency Planning and Crisis Management are
thus key professional skills of the information age.

 When information moves a electronic speeds, it often becomes

instantaneously obsolete. As information is acquired, it is replaced by still newer
information.

Education is now a life-long responsibility because new technologies require updated

skills and training. The quality control employee in a computer chip factory needs an
elementary knowledge of calculus; doctors keeping up with worldwide development in
their specialties on the Internet; Microsoft revises its operating system, and millions of
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workers are thrown into upgrade hell when a smaller software provider
rushes to market with a buggy release.

 Technologies beget technologies. TV begat videotapes; telephones: answering

machines; space satellites: image enhancement technology.

 Media also merge and mutate. The telephone and the radio combined technology
and became cell phones, which are now about to change again due to digital
technology. Computers moved from text to icons, to audio and full motion video and
may now converge with telephones and cable television.

 The interaction among media is greater that the sum of the individual parts.
“Successful” content snowballs and generates growing momentum. This tendency will
grow as individual gain access to newer and more sophisticated media with which to
replicate content.

 The vocabularies of the media themselves are in a constant state of change.

Anticipating and understanding changes in an existing medium can be as valuable as
grasping a new medium. Computer processor speeds and storage capacities are
doubling every year or so. What effects will this have? Will we see more personalized
media? How soon until each consumer gets custom editorials, advertisements, and
news?

 Electronic media are frequently characterized by mass inexpensive access.

Therefore giving away information for free becomes a competitive necessity. Will
inexpensive access democratise media? Camcorders are taking the control of the mass
media out of the hands of the editors and gatekeepers, and into the hands of those who
understand the needs of the medium, or have their own need for a public identity. Will
new media can do further damage to older technology? Mechanical adding machines
vanished overnight. Cable has reshaped the economics of the television medium.
Video the economics of the film medium.

 Broadcast media such as TV are conducive to large, shared live events and
remain the most essential ingredient for triggering large events involving other media.

 Broadcast media generate both instantly disposable content, and endlessly

recyclable content. Shorter form communication is generally more repeatable than
longer form. Humor, catch phrases, bursts of emotion, startling or distinctive imagery,
tends to guarantee repetition.
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 The media amplify certain stories that play into their "language" In addition
to shorter form humor, sound bites, emotion, and surprising visuals, media-genic stories
often involve scandal, celebrities, conflict, including criminally violent conflict as well as
conflict between global village "tribes" such as nations or ethnic groups.

 Media events can be anticipated. It is useful to developing an intuitive

understanding of the effects of the media environment, to become viscerally
"media-wise". Why? Because when the next Rodney King videotape is played, you may
anticipate its consequences.

 All media are interactive As message highways, some media seem to be one-way
streets (e.g. most broadcast TV -- extending this metaphor, think of ratings as a
sidewalk allowing some movement back in the other direction); others seem to be more
participatory two-way streets (the telephone) or an intersection (conference phones or
call-in radio). Has the power of one-way media peaked in 20th century? Only until the
next Super Bowl, or the next world crisis. Earlier this century Alduous Huxley warned us
"never before in human history have so many listeners been at the mercy of so few
speakers" Or, for those buying time in the television upfront: never before have so
many advertisers been at the mercy of so many networks offering so few viewers.

 Effects on News and Information TV codes the news differently from newspapers.
The script for 80% of one nightly news program could fit in a single column of one page
of the NY Times. (What would be missing would be the intonation, and the pictures).
“(The new media have ) aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial
language and bodily gesture. If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or
corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won't be because
there's anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we've failed to master
them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage” –
Edmund Carpenter

Subjected to a global blizzard of information, the consumer of information – and all of us

collectively as information consumers – need to develop the ability to scan, select, and
circulate important information. Trivial celebrity reports and media-genic scandals
dominated the popular media prior to September 11, 2001. As individuals, and as a
country, we could have been better informed and better prepared.
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Do our media distort social and political communication? Is too much
emphasis placed on crude sensationalism, and not enough on substance? Do the media
tend to get ahead of trends and feed on the “cutting edge”, fostering social disruption?

Note that media have different vocabularies. TV itself codes the politicians differently
from newspapers. The newspapers require the politician's policy statements; TV
requires his self-assurance. Beyond the biases of the reporters’, which are the other
biases of the medium itself? Does ease of access cause too much emphasis on politics,
compared to, for instance, coverage of business and technological change? Do our
media cover the globe, or just our neighborhood? Could they do more to tell us
interesting stories about various cultures?

 Effects on Education Educators wary of the new media might consider McLuhan's
observation that "We become robots when uncritically involved with our technologies."

"Today, in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom...

The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity
of information conveyed by school instruction and texts.
In this violently upsetting social situation many teachers naturally view the offerings of the new media as
entertainment rather than education, But this view carries no conviction to the student.
Find a classic which wasn't first regarded as light entertainment.
Nearly all vernacular works were so regarded until the 19th century...The movie, like the book, is a ditto
device. TV shows to 50 million simultaneously.
Some feel that the value of experiencing a book is diminished by being extended to many minds...
Today we're beginning to realize that the new media aren't just mechanical gimmicks for creating
worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
Historically the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing
ways.

The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing, but the character of language and the
relations between author and public.
Radio, film, TV pushed written English towards the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom.
They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture.
If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and
pictorial culture, it won't be because there's anything inherently wrong with them.
It will be because we've failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total
cultural heritage...
Few students ever acquire skill in analysis of newspapers.
Fewer have any ability to discuss a movie intelligently.
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To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an
educated man.
It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment...It's like
setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other
pleases. However it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively."
--Classroom Without Walls, Marshall McLuhan EXPLORATIONS #8 (1957); reprinted in McLUHAN HOT &
COOL (Stearn, ed.)