The Message of "The Medium is The Message"

“So an attitude is caused when we think about something the same way over and over until it becomes automatic. The resulting actions in response to the thought also become automatic. Change the habit of thought and you change the attitude. Change the attitude and you change the resulting action.”
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“The Medium is The Message” is the phrase that made Marshall McLuhan famous. It is a phrase most of us, young and old, have heard. Until a few days ago it was a phrase that confounded me.

Let’s get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.

“The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power.”

“The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium.”

“All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages.”

Here the alphabet is the medium and the message of that medium animated the attitudes of Western man thereby changing the action of all Western generations that followed.

These later quotations are taken from McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”.

I have known for many years that McLuhan had written the book “The Medium is The Message”. I also knew that the book was important. I borrowed the book from the library a year ago and read only a small bit of it and gave up.

I borrowed the same book from the library a few weeks ago and now, today, I understand what the book is about. For the very first time I had that eureka moment when I understood the meaning of the phrase “the medium is the message”.

Understanding might be compared to a jet plane passing through the sound barrier. There is a great transition that occurs and at the boundary identified as the ‘sound barrier’ a great sonic boom is released. Understanding is like this.

The meaning of this phrase is that the effect of a new medium is not as it appears it is not in the content of the message but is in the carrier of the message. The message of the word written on a bit of papyrus is not in the content of the meaning written but is in the fact of the medium itself. The meaning of the written words in the book is a message but the book is THE MESSAGE. The book has changed our habits and thus changed us. When our habits change our attitude and character change and it is in this change that the world and its entire people change. The book’s words carry a message but the book itself is THE MESSAGE.

McLuhan goes on to point out that this applies to all of our technologies. Our technologies change us dramatically because they change our perception and our habits and thus change our attitude and our character.

Dear coberst

McLuhan clearly never read Derrida, or if he did then he didn’t understand it.

This is simply an explanation of how psychological habit works, it says nothing in particular about language and media. It also implies the presumption that if someone sees the same image over and over they’ll interpret it in the same way each time, which is a massive presumption.

I believe it will confound you again once I’ve demonstrated just why it is silly

This is a classic western metaphysical mistake. To understand something one must understand its origin. I don’t see why this should be so…

Making ANY assertion about the significance of the invention of writing is spurious, because one needs writing to do so. One cannot use writing to describe a world without writing, therefore one cannot use writing to asses the importance of writing. This is an abbreviated form of an argument used by Derrida in Of Grammatology.

Not at all, the mark is still something other than the experience. McLuhan is making the classic grammatological mistake (from Plato) that writing is somehow a corrupt form that sacrifices things that other communicatory media hold sacred. The truth is that the other communicatory media also sacrifice these things.

Again, there’s nothing more magical about speech than about writing. McLuhan is simply trotting out the old binary opposition that ranks speech above writing. This has been shown to be illogical and nothing more than a rhetorical habit.

The whole notion of ‘expression’ as used in its simple form is subject to review.

All language is only ever an approximation of experience, I see no importance difference between alphabetic and pictographic languages in this regard. And McLuhan conveniently overlooks that fact that there are easily as many words in the English language as there are images in pictographic languages.

Nice and easy. That’s it, just presume that the structure of language in Ancient Greece is the same as the structure of language now, even though that structure is notoriously fluid. It’s not like you are making uniformitarian assumptions at all, oh no…

And demonstrate that his seperation between medium and message is based on spurious notions of the origins of writing and the essential nature of writing. McLuhan clearly never read poststructuralism, in fact I don’t think he even understood structuralism. I’ve no idea why he has such a high reputation, his work is absolute tosh.

Fortunately that makes my PhD easy to write, if I get round to doing it…

Dear Coberst,

I think you need to read some other stuff, McLuhan is bunk…

For you, perhaps.

This seperation is spurious, as Saussure demonstrated.

Not only the book - this is one of my main problems with McLuhan. He overlooks the question of the border of the text. I need more than just one book in order to understand a book. I need to understand more words than just the ones on the pages in order to understand the book.

The reading of words as an active carrier of a passive signfied message is questionnable.

He is creating a spurious history from an illogical understanding of language. I’m not just unconvinced, I actually think that his stated aim of making peope understand Media more critically isn’t at all served by this approach…

Someone

I must admit that I have never had more than a glancing contact with Derrida or any thing else regarding postmodernism.

The habits developed or fortified by our pervasive medium causes a dramatic change in habits that in turn modify attitude and character of the population. It is not the particular image of the medium it is the medium itself that has the impact on the citizen.

When I go back to the alphabet I am merely making a choice. I could have demonstrated the same thing if I had started with the TV or the Internet.

Quote–Making ANY assertion about the significance of the invention of writing is spurious, because one needs writing to do so. One cannot use writing to describe a world without writing, therefore one cannot use writing to asses the importance of writing. This is an abbreviated form of an argument used by Derrida in Of Grammatology.

This statement is more than I can respond to. We live in different worlds and I suspect do not share sufficient common knowledge with which to communicate in a worth while fashion.

I started with an attempt to clarify step by step my position in the hope that we could see eye-to-eye but after a few attempts I decided to read all of your replies. After reading them all I have decided that we have nothing in common upon which to make a dialogue possible. Perhaps it all goes back to my ignorance of postmoderinism.

I am sorry that I cannot engage with you in a dialogue but it seems that both of us would be just wasting our time shouting at one another.

I will try to gain some knowledge about postmodern thought and perhaps after I do I can come back to you and discuss matters in which we share some significant knowledge. From what you have said I suspect I shall have to delete everything I now think I know and replace it with postmodern knowledge.

Chuckie

If that’s an attempt at sarcasm it was pretty poor. ‘Postmodern knowledge’ - WTF?

Coberst - engaging in philosophical discussion is about exchanging your own ideas, not about demonstrating what you have or have not read. so no need to be discouraged or intimidated if you haven’t read something that someone else has - the most important thing is to think…

Someone - unnecessary harshness on your part, i think. the poor guy’s just trying to present an idea!

I have a vested interest in swatting down the reputations of people like McLuhan. Perhaps I was being harsh…

why? we can imagine a situation where a person might only read one book in their life, and only understand the words contained in the book, but would still understand the book. it’s unlikely, but it’s possible, no?

also, how does that relate to coberst’s point that the message is in the medium, not the words?