User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 03/09

The Medium Is the Message, Marshall McLuhan

(From The New Media Reader)

a means of control --> splitting and dividing all things

medium is the message --> in operating and practical fact <--> merely to say <--> the personal and social consequences of any medium --> of any extension of ourselves

the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves

the essence of machine technology--> the restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation

the essence of automation technology --> integral and decentralist in depth

the "content" of any medium is always another medium (the content of speech is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal; the content of writing is speech, the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph; electric light is pure information, it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium)

theme --> the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing process.

the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

---

Marshal McLuhan:

reading = rapid guessing

the natural of art = set a trap for people’s attention

dialogue = encounter interface with others people and situations —> violence = self-expression (quest of identity)

rear view mirror —> future

the television uses the eye and the ear, phrase of Tony Schwartz in a book called The Responsive Chord —> images is constitute by millions of this resonating particles, there is no images, no snapshots, no shutters, there’s no camera. There is an offer , an outpouring of these small bits of information in patterns that are entirely active and dynamic. So the television is resonating form experience

inside outside

putting people on —> teasing them/ challenge them/ upsetting them/ befuddling them/ hurting them

simply pointing to the thing they have ignored; the things that concern them very nearly but have been totally pushed aside as insignificant ==> advertising (has to be a certain comic element in a good advertisement)

comic is always the registration of a grievance

tv charisma —> looking like a lot of other people

radio —> a package medium, hot media (wrap up packaging media)

tv —> cool media or involving character (concerned with processes)

phonetic alphabet —> Euclidean space

left hemisphere (interested in quantity) / right hemisphere (has no bottom line, interested only in quality) acoustically-oriented