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