http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
Firstly, it is important to put the work in context. Federman's article has an explanatory purpose, aimed at explaining Marshal McLuhan's dogmatically famous quote, "the medium is the message". This particular phrase comes from McLuhan's 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It has long been debated what he meant by it, as McLuhan was notoriously well known for being obscure. The misunderstanding of this phrase is what Federman is addressing:
Often people will triumphantly hail that the medium is "no longer the message," or flip it around to proclaim that the "message is the medium," or some other such nonsense. McLuhan meant what he said; unfortunately, his meaning is not at all obvious, and that is where we begin our journey to understanding.
Federman sympathetically explains McLuhan's famous phrase by breaking it down. For him, 'medium' is the extension of the human body which McLuhan discusses, that being virtually anything that we may use: a tool, a TV screen, a book, language, etc. It is a medium in the sense that it causes a 'message'. This message is similarly a broad category, being any change in in our environment (culture, society). However as Federman says, we often miss these changes by only regarding the superficial changes we see overtly. His example is of the news; most people would think that the message of the news (the medium) is the stories they are recounting but it is in fact the change reflected in the public/society induced by that story. In this sense then, the story itself is also a medium, another of Federman's points. On the whole we can see that McLuhan's messages are almost common sensical. Yes we ca see, if not instantaneously, then over a generation, our societies and cultures change. And yes, certainly the theatre is an extension of ourselves, a medium in a myriad of ways, the most obvious being an entity given to conveying a story in a visual and somewhat realistic manner. However it is the non-obvious that apparently McLuhan was after, thereby becoming 'McLuhan media' as Federman puts it. From The Medium is the Massage McLuhan gives television (coming to widespread predominance in mass culture in the 1960's) this attention as a medium, as it reshaped the participatory ability of the public in "...Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events..." (page 22) Therefore the message was the change in public participation caused by the television medium and its effects on society.
Heretofore I have agreed with Federman's analysis, as what McLuhan meant is understandable if one takes the time to read through McLuhan's texts and consult secondary literature (like Federman's article). However, I wish to now point out some more negative aspects of this theory and explanation. Federman quotes McLuhan on the 'nature', 'essence' and 'character' of a medium as being that which is the most important aspect, rather then its content or form and that further the message derived from a particular medium is what reveals these. However both are ambiguous on what exactly the 'nature' of a medium is, how it is understood from the message it gives and why specifically such an 'essence' (substituting for nature or character) is so important. Take television as an example, what is the nature of television? It's ability to convey visual representations, auditory sense datum and information from around the globe? Or is it that it is available to everyone (questionably), or is it that television is different from prior types of information communication? It may all of these, or none of them. Also, it may be that none of these are important as regards the medium of television (although I think McLuhan would give an explanation containing some of these qualities). But take something not so obvious, such as one's wallet (a result of looking around the room) It is the product of a human mind, in concept and material composition, and since the above definition of medium includes all such things, what is the essence of a wallet? How has it changed the way our society operates or how culturally we think? Of course one can easily give a hatchet-job explanation, which is exactly the point. The category of medium is ridiculously broad (including almost everything) in turn reducing to the thought that McLuhan's work is common sensical. Therefore, I must content myself with McLuhan's goal being to only point out things that most people overlook.
Something I do not completely accept however, is Federman's brief discussion of language. He says that language is also a medium, one that we use to convey our thoughts to other people. However I agree with most analytic language philosophers of the twentieth century that we cannot have thoughts without language. Hence the typical inability of people to remember when they were very young. Federman continues saying that speech is a way to bring our "sensorially-shaped minds out to the world". I do not agree that they are sensorially shaped, but language shaped. However this slightly pedantic digression still assumes language as a medium, however perhaps the most complex one. Otherwise I agree with Federman's interpretation of McLuhan's phrase 'the medium is the message'. As it is required, a question for others to ponder: with Federman's explanations of 'the medium is the message', is the category of mediums so broad so as to render any analysis of McLuhan media meaningless since anything can be a medium? If so, do we have any predictive power over the messages (changes) that will come from these mediums?
A supplementary link to an essay buy a McLuhan scholar on the same subject, but I find her examples more lucid:
http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v10n02/html/rideout/rideout.html
Tim
I don't think that the potential scope of the concept of a medium is a problem for McLuhan media analysis. Perhaps anything can be a medium, but there is also going to be a hierarchy of effect; the messages of certain media will have a more profound effect on our society than the messages of other media. In fact, I think that the awareness of the broad scope of media makes McLuhan analysis more useful, in the sense that we can apply it more widely.
ReplyDeleteI'm not certain I agree that everything is a medium though. A wallet is a result of our society's requirement that we carry items on our person when in public to fulfill legal and economic needs. It's only one reaction to this necessity too: I don't personally use a wallet; I just shove cash and plastic in my pockets depending on where I'm going. A wallet seems more like a tool than a medium to me.
That being said, I agree with you that we can expand the concept of a medium to more things than one might think at first glance. Perhaps a better example of an overlooked medium would be graffiti and tagging? This is a case where it seems clear that the message is more important than the content of the medium. Unless one is in a gang, one doesn't really pay attention to tags. Yet the medium reverberates through the halls of municipal councils as they discuss gang activity, street safety, and street "beautification," all of which ignores the content in favour of the message the medium itself sends.
I agree with your point, Tim that there is more to 'the medium' than initially meets the eye. Graffiti is a great example of this. And I like how you explained this above, Ben. Great analogy - and exactly along the lines I was thinking.
ReplyDeleteI won't go into detail reiterating what was said above, but I find the arguments in this response to Federman's article quite entertaining, as I almost agree with both points being made, with regards (for lack of a better example) to the wallet. I do see how it is more of a tool than a medium, as you state Ben. But I think Tim was going for something broader than this, and simply threw the object of the "wallet" out there, as it was in plain sight. But ultimately what he was getting at is, how do we classify what is medium and what is not? If all the circumstances that make television a medium can then be applied to a wallet, how do we differentiate what is medium and what is not?
Excuse me, Tim if I have gone in a totally different direction. I hope I see where you're coming from, in that McLuhan is trying to bring into focus all that we overlook. It's often the most obvious that blends in to the background, and gets overlooked, and whether we realize that or not is a totally different conversation. :)
No, Simply Real, you hit the mark. While I likewise agree that the wallet can be a tool, as Ben said, it may also be a medium. The problem I see is that McLuhan did not give any criteria to differentiate between the two, and the criteria he did give include everything as a medium. What are we to take as important?
ReplyDeleteThe problem with any 'hierarchy of effect' is our inability to tell what is an effect of what. Perhaps similar to the concept of the butterfly effect, some media will produce an effect that we are unaware of, and may only become aware of it [much] later on. As for the waller I literally turned to what was on my desk at the time; there can easily be many more examples of a less problematic caliber. However for the wallet I can say that the economic necessities imposed by society are the medium, the reactionary tool of the wallet the effect, in turn the wallet can be a medium in that it lends aid to the linear and compartmentalization of our thought (see Walter Ong's discussion of this). That being said I agree that graffiti is an excellent example.
Perhaps whether something is a medium depends upon the frame of reference for the discussion, then. In some contexts, a wallet may be a medium, but in other contexts it is not.
ReplyDeleteIf this is true, is it true of all media? Can television not be a medium sometimes? Or is that a counterexample to this entire idea of relative media?
Hmmm you have posed a very large problem. I see it as essentially asking whether medium theory is subjective/relative or not. If television has instances of not being a medium, when would those instances occur? Also, does it not hinge on perspective whether or not they occur? If so, then television as a medium, or as an effect would be subject dependent. How can we then reconcile medium theory's already enormous scope with its new subjectivity?
ReplyDelete> How can we then reconcile medium theory's already enormous scope with its new subjectivity?
ReplyDeleteYears of therapy?
I have no a priori difficulty with accepting the relativeness of medium theory, but I can see how that would pose problems when it comes to determining the message of a medium—if the medium is subject-dependent, then it is harder to ascribe any particular medium as having effects on a societal scale….
You are right, it is a very large question. :D I think that's about as far as I can go with my knowledge. Maybe there are people writing about this right now.
Regarding when television is not a medium, I have no idea. It bears further consideration. Trying to think of such cases has helped me better comprehend what you mean when you insist on viewing a wallet as a medium though.
One way of limiting the scope of what can be defined as a medium would be to determine how widespread the effects are. McLuhan was interested in the larger, societal effects that any given medium might have. So language and television have notably widespread effects. The use of a wallet might have equally widespread effects (I do not know the history of wallets) but, borrowing a Foucauldian technique, one could do something like a 'genealogy' of the wallet to determine if the ability to carry money around on our persons had a large impact on society. This also hints at the other issue, which is that of the predictability of these effects. Medium Theory would suggest that it is the aim of the theorist to, in some ways, predict the effects of a new medium, but sometimes it is only retrospectively that the "unanticipated consequences" become clear.
ReplyDelete