By Charles kulwa n reg no 42688

The media is the message

Marshall Mc Luhann

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium that is of any extension of our selves result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each of us, or by any new technology. Thus with automation for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, who is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message.

In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillac’s. The restricting of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationship

The instance of electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristics 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 print, and print is the content of 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. An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For example the message of any medium or technology is change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railways did not introduced movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kind of work and leisure. This happen whether the railways functions in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railways medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to..