A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan (November 18, 1961, age 50). The invisibility of media
Every medium “is invested with a cloak of invisibility.” Why else would people not notice what they are doing to us?
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Hope this helps …
Here is a short list of media that have shed the cloak of invisibility to become visible to us while they remain invisible to their users:
- Huge head phones
- Cell phones in taxi cabs
- Ball caps in restaurants
- Chewing gum at the theatre
- Plaid shirts everywhere
- Dirt-stained sweat pants
- Nap sacks on old men
Here is author of is “Google making us stupid?, Nicholas Carr, with another list:
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 281.
Tags: Communications, Electronic media, Entertainment, Medium is the message, Social media, Technology
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Really!
Everyone knows Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message.” But hardly anyone understands what he meant by it.
Are you ready for it? New media change the way we perceive the world. How? Because they change the way we sense the world. With our perceptions changed the world becomes a different place.
So what? Your children, being shaped by different media than the media that shaped you, are entirely different creatures and live in an entirely different world. But you knew that already didn’t you?
Marshall McLuhan (1977 age 65/66). We’re re-tribalising!
Boom! Boom! Boom go the drums! [Be patient this 8 minute video is well worth it]
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967.
Tags: Conversation, Electronic media, Hot and cool media, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology, Understanding media
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Who put the geewiz in the global village?
If there is one thing everyone knows about Marshall McLuhan, it is that he said we have been recreated by electronic technology in “the image of a global village.” It is tempting to look at this idea of a global village as a positive vision of the essential oneness of all peoples on this planet. To see our global village bathed in an electric glow in the night skies as a warm, safe, and supportive place. To experience the good vibrations that come as we listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
This was the temptation I almost fell prey to yesterday. But McLuhan had a very different thing in mind when he talked about a global village.
Marshall McLuhan (1977 age 65/66). We are going tribal!
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p. 67.
Tags: Communications, Culture, Electronic media, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Technology
Me (September, 2010, age 58). Who can make sense of this?
Goths, Tattoos, and Celine Dion
Sex Tapes, Oprah, and Chef Gordon Ramsay
Dubai, Silicon Valley, and Off-shoring Jobs
Touch Bars, Internet Porn, and Pamela Anderson
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia
Gated Communities, The Homeless, and Meth
Twilight, Book Clubs, and Islamic Militarisml
Teen-age Bullying and Date Rape
The Recession and Global Warming
The 21st Century
Marshall McLuhan (September, 2010, age 99). I can.
How? I’ll give you a hint. Click on this link.
Don’t like that idea? I’ve got others. Tune in next week.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.
Tags: Communications, Contraststudios247, Culture, Electronic media, Matthew Swann, Medium is the message, Social media, Technology, Television, Understanding media
Marshall McLuhan (February 6, 1974, age 62). Read all about it
Did you happen to see TV Guide for September 15, 1973? There is a report of the effects of quitting TV watching cold turkey in England and Germany. They paid people to turn off their sets off for as long as they could stand it. Some lasted three months but most could only do it for a week. And all showed the same kind of symptoms of withdrawal as alcoholics or drug addicts do when denied their fix. Quite obviously this had nothing to do with their missing the content of Bonanza or the Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They could not do without the medium.
Me (May 2010, age 57). TV Guide ain’t a scientific journal
But what does that matter, McLuhan wasn’t a scientist. He insisted that everything he said could be tested by anyone who was willing to look honestly at the world. Our experiment with living without TV continues in the Hinton household. Three months and counting. I must say I have had some withdrawal symptoms. My experience is that Internet video and rented DVDs are not the same as TV. And I must agree with McLuhan that it is not the program content I miss. But then, this is not a scientific test.
However, a recent study appears to both support and contradict McLuhan. On the one hand it shows the increasing power of electronic media to create dependency. On the other it would appear that modern users of electronic media are dependent on both the content and the medium.
According to the study in which 200 college students were asked to give up “any media interaction” (texting, facebook, phone, TV) for 24 hours and then report the experience, many found the assignment impossible to complete and others reported uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms. Participants reported missing their virtual relationships.
What about you? Have you ever tried to give up TV? Any other media interaction? What happened?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 490-91.
Tags: Communications, Electronic media, Medium is the message, Television
Marshall McLuhan (March 25, 1974, age 61). Hercule Poirot knows!
The truth is not beauty nor shall it set you free. It is explosive and discomforting. In my study of media I have noticed it time and again, the minute you talk to people about media effects they start to lose their cool. Nobody wants to hear that the medium is the message. It only upsets them. It is when people get upset I know I’m on to something.
“What is truth?” asks Agatha Christie’s consulting detective Hercule Poirot. “Eet ees whatever upsets zee applecart.”
Me (May 2010, age 57). Look out!
One apple cart I keep upsetting has to do with PowerPoint. In my work as a presentations coach I encourage corporate presenters to think about the effects PowerPoint will have on their audiences. This is something it appears it takes courage to do. PowerPoint is now so deeply ingrained in business as both a project management tool as well as a presentation device that as one corporate manager said, “I couldn’t think without PowerPoint.”
What apple carts are you upsetting?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 491.
Tags: Communications, Medium is the message, Social myths
Marshall McLuhan (April 2, 1971, age 59). We are.
When I heard the news on TV about Lt. Wiliam Calley’s life sentence for the My Lai massacre it suddenly hit me. TV steps up our sense of involvement so much that for example in the public broadcast of a trial the audience becomes the criminal. Or more prosaically, the medium contains not the message but the user.
Me (May 2010, age 57). What do you remember most vividly?
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the memories that remain most vivid to me are associated with TV broadcasts:
- O.J. in the white Ford Bronco;
- the crashing of the jet liner into the Twin Towers;
- the funerals of JFK
Why? McLuhan would say that in these TV spectacles the audience becomes the criminal, the terrorists, the corpse, the astronaut.
What events do you remember most vividly?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 430-31.
Tags: Communications, Electronic media, Medium is the message, Technology, Television, Visual medium
Marshall McLuhan (April 29, 2010, age 98). “Corinne, come and look at this!”
“What is it, now, Marshall?”
“The PowerPoint slide from a military presentation in Afghanistan everyone’s talking about.”
“What in Heaven’s a PowerPoint slide?”
“One in a sequence of overheated overhead slides. This one’s a doozy.”
“Looks to me like a plate of spaghetti.”
“Forget the spaghetti. Consider the medium. PowerPoint is an electronic overhead or magic lantern slide show, one damn slide after another. The business of the medium is push things through, relentlessly, to resolve difficulties to get it all over. Its great advertising, but it’s not a conversation.”
“Why, Marshall, would they want a conversation in Afghanistan?”
“To come up with fresh ideas.”
Me (April 2010, age 57). Another problem with PowerPoint
Every medium creates its own environment that for the most part is invisible. But every now and again something happens to make the environment visible. Seen outside it’s natural context, the military briefing, the slide reveals the hubris and waste of military resources that’s taking place in Afghanistan. At home and in the field PowerPoint Rangers are fighting it out in an escalating war. A war to present the illusion of the capture of the most detail in a single slide.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Tags: American mind, Communications, Conversation, Culture, Electronic media, Medium is the message, Technology, Visual medium
Marshall McLuhan (December 1, 1966, age 55). The Medium is the Massage!
Frank Taylor, the editor in chief of the book division of McGraw-Hill, the publishers of Understanding Media, phoned today. Poor chap was quite incensed to discover that Random House is publishing the Medium is the Massage. Editors are as bad as wives. Look at another woman and they think you’re having an affair. I assured him he had nothing to fear from my dalliance with Random House. McGraw-Hill is my true love. Two reasons: (1) I wrote nothing new for this book – it’s all pictures and excerpts from my previous writing put together by others; and (2) It will push up the sales of my other books. He seemed somewhat relieved.
Me (March 2010, age 57). If best means understandable!
Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage is a McLuhan book almost anyone can read with understanding – in part because of the pictures, and in part because someone else put it together. (Graphic designer Quentin Fiore and writer Jerome Agel. These two also put together War and Peace in the Global Village, another book McLuhan didn’t write.)
It has been said that the title was originally owing to a typographical error. Possibly, but unlikely. The message of the pun pervades the book: The electronic media are working you over and here are a few of the things they are doing to you.
Have you looked at it? If so, what did you think? If not, you should.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 339.
Tags: Books, Communications, Creating, Electronic media, Medium is the massage, Medium is the message, Relationship, Understanding media, Visual medium
Marshall McLuhan (March 1, 1966, age 54). All can be well.
I do not know how people can say I am a cheerleader for the new electric media. Here’s a line from Harold Rosenberg’s 1965 New Yorker article on me: “Understanding Media is McLuhan’s good-bye to Gutenberg and to Renaissance, ‘typographic’ man; that is to the self-centered individual.”
Well, it may be, but my hope is that it is not. I am, myself, after all, a typographic man. What I have often said I will say again. Our culture and values, which were nurtured and developed by print, need not disappear as a result of the rise of the new electric media. By studying these new media we can ensure that we survive them. But study them we must for if we play the role of helpless bystander we will surely go the way of the Dodo.
Me (March 2010, age 57). An experiment
A month ago, the Hinton household said good bye to TV. In other words we are now studying the effects of TV on us. How is it going? The first effect is that we have returned to the dinner table to eat dinner. The second is that TV has reappeared in our lives as the contents of other, newer media such as the internet (PBS.com, CBS.com, CTV.com, Global.com, etc.) and DVD. And as McLuhan said the new media (DVD and internet download) does make the old media (TV) look like classic fare. At any rate, “Nurse Jackie” on DVD does not feel like TV. It feels more like film. Or rather filmish.
Do you know anyone who has said good bye to TV or other media? What has been the effect?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 334
Tags: Communications, Culture, Hot and cool media, Medium is the message, Technology, Television, Understanding media