Marshall McLuhan famously changed the shape of media studies with his influential work, ”The Medium is the Massage”. (The word Massage evidently originated as a printer’s error which was then adopted by McLuhan in an ironical act. It no doubt struck him that the waves sent out by media communications ”massaged” the receivers with their vibrations.)
The analyses of McLuhan’s phrase, ‘the medium is the message’ are often clouded by jargon and mental acrobatics. A medium is anything that acts as a carrier of information between two points in space and time. For example, a television is a medium which carries the information, which is projected through cable lines into the television, from the sender to the viewer. In this example, the cable lines are also a medium. They can be, for example, mediators of electricity. Language is a mediator of the content of our sign systems, used to translate external phenomena into behaviour patterns through the mind.
As someone who has long been fascinated by McLuhan, media studies in general, along with philosophy, science, psychology, and cultural history, but has always striven after an understanding of how knowledge relates to human behaviour, I felt as if something was missing from McLuhan’s formulation.
McLuhan wanted us to start thinking of media themselves, instead of just the information that we broadcast across them. For example, I am writing these words and they may be read and interpreted in a given way by you the reader, but what I have written is far less significant than the structures and even networks of the different media in our lives. Examples of the latter would be the computers, phones and the like which we use to compose internet sites and read, or engage with, them.
This kind of analysis would move a step further, as seeing media as part of systems, and the final system would be an ecological system, or a cosmological system. To say that an internet site is part of an ecosystem is an attempt to point out that, as a medium, an internet site works among a number of media, for example computers. Even insofar as a computer itself is a piece of information, the production processes themselves would be media as well, including the stores one buys with, whether they be online or in a physical location.
This ‘McLuhanian’ media view traces the structures of our lives, and we can examine the type of world we live in and the beings in it. One could even go so far as to ask whether a tree is a medium, and there are many ways that a tree could be conceived and analysed as a medium. A good example would be through explication of the process of photosynthesis.
McLuhan saw issues with looking only at the contents of media. In photosynthesis, the contents would be things such as light, carbon dioxide, water, sugar, and oxygen, and so on. In a website, it would be these words as well as the layout designed by the website provider. McLuhan believed that if we paid more attention to the media themselves, and the systems and networks which they function in, we could gain a better grasp of the impact of any information as it is transferred across space and time.
Since early youth, education has been a passion of mine. Not just educating people about various topics, but about how education works as a process. How it forms skills, habits, and behaviours of people which continue throughout their lives. I began thinking about this as a child. Though I did not read Marshall McLuhan, I was directly exposed to an institutionalized school system, and it made me consider not only which information was chosen and which was not for our lessons, but even the environment which is created around the school, through peers as well as attitudes and classroom schedules. Even how a classroom is structured, with students in a seated position over prolonged periods of time, with an instructor who is in a position of authority not only to decide which discourse is accepted and which is not, but assign judgements of value based on pre-planned courses or systems of education.
This was one of the first issues I applied my McLuhan’s theory to. The result of that application was the formulation of what I believe should be the natural continuation of Marshall McLuhan’s statement, ”the medium is the message”. That statement, in my opinion, should continue, ”the mode is the meaning”.
What I mean by ”the mode is the meaning”, is that any given message will have a meaning for us. If we are going to look at the medium, for example this website, or websites in general, the internet, and so on, including the network of relations and the systems which any medium is embedded in, and receive some message from them, how can we tune into what that message is? The problem with McLuhan’s’ formulation, is that stores seem to stand empty, or if they have products those products of themselves mediums, but of what? We could look at the ingredients list at our grocery stores. They are often filled with numerous chemicals which we know very little about. But is that the message? But what does it mean?
Understanding ”the mode is the meaning” is very simple. Mediums are used in various manners, to transfer information. But we use those mediums in certain ways. For example, I use this blog to put up certain information, but we could classify this information into ‘kinds’ of information. Embedded in these ‘kinds’ of information is the ‘mode’ in which I use this medium. As a website user, one might use the various contents of the website in a given way. One might read it, one might click on certain buttons, to get to other places, or to have certain effects on the page, and so on.
Just like media themselves, our modes are also related to broader networks and systems. We do not use the internet or this blog in a vacuum. We use them as part of lifestyles that we engage in. Those lifestyles are parts of networks, if one wishes to think of them that way. These networks stretch historically, because we and objects exist over time. Thinking this way opens us to recognizing causes which impact us which are outside of ourselves.
One can think of our physical world in a number of ways. Geographically, for example, in the form of various maps composed of the Earth. In terms of our daily experience of the world around us, including institutions, property and the practices we associate with them and the laws attached to their use and potential.
Marshall McLuhan invited us to look at the world as composed of various mediums, ourselves included. He told us that this was the message. For example, we are mediums of energy and power through our effort. What we put our effort into receives that energy. If collectively, humanity puts their effort into the industries, companies and corporations, then the collective practices of these companies, through their various mediums, whether they be the workplaces themselves, through production facilities, or through marketing and sales methods, will receive that effort and that energy.
What I want to add to McLuhan’s ”message” is it’s ”meaning”, which is to say its mode. The institution of marketing is interesting, because it purports to be the communications of messages. This could also be said for any communications, whether they be from news organizations, politicians, and private individuals. McLuhan would not have us look at what ”marketers” say, but at the medium.
”Marketing” is a medium because it transfers information, namely people, to become ”marketers”. This logic is at play in all jobs, titles, and particularly culturally conceived naming systems.
What I am asking for is to take this logic a step farther, and ask about the mode in which the medium transfers information. A classic example of a medium for media theorists is the television, and in contemporary studies the internet. Media theorists would ask questions about the way the media, such as technology like our phones, computers, and so on, interacts in the life-world or ecosystem of other media. Humans, as explained, can be part of this media.
To look at the mode of marketing, one would look at the entire institution, from its foundations, origins, the titles and designations within its various institutions, canonical texts, and so on. The institutions of marketing then operate by broadcasting signals. These signals are often done through technology, but also techniques such as having popular or authoritative figures and celebrities communicate information, and many more techniques which are intended to create a kind of vibration in the receiver.
Marketing institutions do not just operate on the level of individual advertisements, but rather create ”brand names” and ”brand presences”, where their symbols and institutions are recurring in people’s lives and ecospheres, online or off.
From this perspective. We, as transmitters of power, energy, and potential, would then choose our various modes of transmission. The modes of transmission we choose to use speak the meaning of our message.
This was originally posted on our blog: https://waderbyorchard.wordpress.com/2021/06/28/the-medium-is-the-message-the-mode-is-the-meaning/
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