Notes

Chapter 1: The Medium is the Message

This is about technology, and how technology shapes us. The introduction of technology and machines is important because of the technology, not necessarily the things produced with them. The strong example here is the light bulb. “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it were used to spell out some verbal ad or name.” A consequence of this last bit is that the content of a medium will always be another medium: “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.'”

This last bit pins down the notion of a medium as a conduit. It also poses the idea that the “content” of media form a chain that extends from one’s own ineffable thoughts. McLuhan is more interested in the process by which this transfer occurs, the nature of the conduit, and the ramifications of the medium than the actual point of origination (or reception, I suppose).

Countering an argument made by General David Sarnoff, McLuhan emphasizes that it is poor reasoning to claim that media is inherently without bias. Examples are the ideas that firearms are neutral, that it is the wielders who determine their value, or that the smallpox virus is neutral, it is the way that it is used that determines its value. These are media in that they are enablers and channels of certain events and actions. Their positive existence adds onto and complicates the human condition.

McLuhan argues from cubism (which treats space and time as the content of its medium, as opposed to clear subjects), to Napoleon’s mastery of gunpowder as a medium, to the mastery of Alexis de Tocqueville over print. De Toqueville understood print as creating a kind of uniformity in France and America (whose resolutions oriented their culture around single focused ideas), but this was lacking in England because of its complex diversity of ideologies and cultural practices. McLuhan goes from there to discuss the effects of radio and modern communication in other cultures (Bedouin). These cultures have their own media and means of communication, to which we are deaf and blind because of our accustomization to our electrical world.

On the effects of media, specifically advertisements. It is silly to claim that one can pay no attention to ads, because that is in essence impossible. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” The effect of this is the slow and deliberate infiltration performed by the values and ideology of the medium being absorbed. I would say that these values must be procedural in nature.

A further effect of media is almost linguistic. Media is formative, it is so by being a staple or resource of society. The result of the saturation of a staple is the tendency for everything to connect to that staple. Economically, politically, culturally, mythologically, etc. By being suffused with media, our culture is necessarily wrought with the concepts of that media.

A thought:

Adopting a type theory approach… One might claim that, while thought is the medium that generates all other media, it is the medium of culture that is in turn generated by all other media. Because media shapes and adds to the human condition, it is a necessary effect of all media to inform the conduit of culture. This could be taken to shape what types of interactions and developments and ideas are possible within a sociological frame.