What is the message of McLuhan's medium?

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What is the message of McLuhan’s medium?

“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 months 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.”

Consider the invention of the printing press and the introduction of books to the society. A book communicates a message. Many books communicate many messages. ‘The book’ communicates the same message to everyone who comes into contact with the book. The book transmits the same message to everyone while many books transmit many different messages to many different people.

Evolution moves very slowly. We adapt to our environment very slowly. We survive because we do adapt. When we change more quickly than we can adapt we face problems that we have not had the time to make the kind of adjustments necessary.

The habits we acquire determine our state of mind. Our changing habits are part of this process of adaptation to our environment. Do not think of environment as being just the quality of our air or water but it is a broad term signifying the world we live in.

So we have changed very dramatically our habits that were part of us when we knew little and understood much. I am speaking relatively here. What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change? I do not know but I only point to the fact as worth consideration.

Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another. Think for a minute if instead of sitting and watching TV we were physically escorted done a hallway with many doors. Then we open a door and are physically placed into this world we see on TV. Our reaction would be very different. In other words we are creatures prepared for a certain world that no longer exists. This is the definition of a forthcoming extinction if we think about the meaning of evolution.

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In my reading of McLuhan, I came across his idea that there is nothing innate in humans to suggest the invention of a bicycle. With his showing ignorance of our biological experience with motion and geometry I found it difficult to read him further. In the simple signal, medium, reception processes of sound, and perhaps other sensory informational transfers, the medium carries the message. It is not the message. It cannot be construed as being the message on any level of communication. Physics is our primary experience. Explanations of experience are secondary.

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I understand your frustration with McLuhan. He is a tuff read because he says things that are contrary to common perception. However, I do think that he is worth the effort. I do not think I have read anyone who seems to have such a vast and unique insight.

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Vast and unique insights can be wrong.

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Absolutly. They can be wrong and probably many are. But one is mistaken to assume such before learning what was said. But learning it is difficult but I think it is very important.

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McLuhan will vanish from the stage of philosophy simply because he offers no ideas as to how to solve the mind/matter issue, but persists in adding to the Cartesian dualism that makes the issue unsolvable. See Gilbert Ryle, “The Concept of Mind”.

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I think he means (or should mean) that, to varying degrees, the medium says a lot about the message sender, and by association, the message.

Let me talk about what it means in ad biz, I’ll try to tie it in to philosophy at the end.

When you use the media of a Super Bowl commercial, there is the commercial itself, but much is conveyed by the media choice itself, the real message is: we matter, we are big time, we have two million bucks to spend for 30 seconds, eat that motherfucker.

Another media form is the crappy promo stuff you see at sales centers and conventions. You can put cute slogan on a pen, but the message is: we want your business, we buy cheap crap to put our name on in hopes of getting more business. People who like cheap crap might buy your product if its cheap crap.

People generally don’t see Armani slogans on coffee mugs. But you might see an Armani Coffee brand come out in a few years. Coffee as a medium. I can come up with a million headlines or cute labels for Armani coffee, but even without doing that you already know the message in your gut. It says we’re the first clothier to have its own fucking brand of coffee. And nothing’s cooler than coffee. Except, of course, ARMANI coffee.

When an advertiser indulges in “viral marketing” on Youtube or MySpace it says the adveriser is hip, cutting edge. Or it could say they are desperate and manipulative. Either way, it says they are tryng to survive in the new math. It tells me they push for the better, the new, the relevant - even if they fail sometimes, that’s attractive in itself. The media choice alone charms me into believing in the brand.

Here is TV tagline, it may as well be: Budweiser, The Beer Company That Buys Lots Of TV Space.

If you choose the medium of philosophy to convey a message, the underlying message (which is the medium) might be “my philosophy is: to choose philosophy as my medium.” The choice to choose philosophy speaks volumes about your ultimate message and worldview.

The choice to use a philosophy post on ILP is a message in itself. One that gets repeated and traded ad nauseum around here. Whoops, I did it again. Hope you enjoyed this message/medium.

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Do you know what is so delightful about this piece, Gamer?

It forces the reader to ask “then why is he sitting in a bathtub full of water?” Nothing else is important and it is never mentioned directly. Why else would she ask him if he was taking a bath if he wasn’t sitting in the tub?

That is what is funny about that quote, I think. Well done, if it is your making.

Another one which uses the same kinda indirect referencing to context is something like (both quotes of FZ):

“well why don’t you sharpen it then?”

Sharpen what, asks the reader, then realizes it is refering to a pencil. At this point the joke is played…it is too late. One’s pencil is indeed dull to have taken that long to understand the joke.

another could be:

“don’t you ever wash that thing?”

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Points well explained Mr. Detrop.

The quote is from Cormac McCarthy’s excellent new book entitled. The Road. There is a dull sound, a rose-colored glow off in the distance. It’s the middle of night, and the end of the world. The man gets up and starts filling the bath with both knobs turned up all the way.

“Why are you taking a bath?” She said.
“I’m not,” he said.

Or something like that. It was the end of the chapter, but you knew from this small encounter that he was both smart in a survivalist sense, and a man of few words. I’m sure you, Detrop, can identify with at least half of that. Why not read The Road. It’s good.

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I think he have done some good considerable approach on trying to understand how the technology of electronic and print media in the 20th century have influence human behavior as have the printing press have done in subsequent centuries in the past.

Of course his attempt on mind/matter was entirely too metaphysical and should be discredited :laughing: but i have to say some of his works on technology and how it influence society is still a good insight on how we live.

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I think McLuhan was exaggerating. Yes the medium is a message in itself, and yes it has an effect on the message, but it is not the message. The message is the message, the medium is the medium. The medium has a great effect on the message, but it isn’t the message. It’s the medium.

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thezeus18,
Is the poem yours? It’s outstanding!

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Is this to make a point, or a comment on my message medium message medium rhythm?

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Wrong, and wrong. This is something I flatter myself to know a bit about, so everybody sit back and prepare to have some misconceptions cleared up.

First, Chinese characters are not ideograms.

Rahter, each character represents both a meaning AND a sound-syllable, the latter is more or less fixed, the former is highly plastic and depends heavily on context within multisyllabic words.

There is a tiny category of characters known as “puo-yin-zi” (broken sound words) that can take more than one sound but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Further, the morphology and etymology of most characters is phonetic more than ideomagramatic, consisting of a meaningless phonetic component intended only to hint at pronunciation, paired with a second non-phonetic component that distinguishes it from sound-syllables with a similar or identical pronunciation. Hence, the characters that can be thought of as “pictures” of things and ideas are vanishingly few.

Second, Chinese characters are not in any sense more meaningful, more epxressive or culturally richer than alphabetic writing. Vastly more often than not, no meaningful relationship exists between a character etymology and its current meaning, and when such a relationship doeshappent to exist it will be known if at all only to academics and linguistics geeks.

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thezeus18,
No point to be made other than I liked your poem.
beautifulspam,
Good insights. Chinese writing is composed of pictographs in the same way that Egyptian hieroglyphics are. The pictograph appears to be the first human attempt to communicate in ways other than sound or smell. It followed the drawing on cave walls. I’m sure that one can find in Chinese writing the same subject, object, verb, connectors, modifiers that appear in a more linear Western writing. These elements, however, appear more concrete in that idiom by virtue of being aspects of a whole thought that evokes meaning, rather than a linear, piece by piece reference.
What does all this have to do with MacLuhan?

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beautifulspam,

Thank you Ierellius, but respectfully, no it is not.

No, that is not accurate.

What is has to do with MacLuhan is this: Everything MacLuhan asserts about written Chinese in this passage is dead wrong. I hope that his assessment of chinese writing is not central to his argument.

Sorry, bad mood today. :imp:

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beautifulspam,
No need to be sorry. I respect your ideas even when they disagree with mine. By saying Chinese writing is pictographic, I was simply saying that it appears to present a whole rather than a linear progression of parts. Haiku and Zen masters insist on this distinction. Maybe I missed what McLuhan said about the Chinese. Could you reiterate for an old fart who is short on memory, but long on attempts to understand?

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Ierellius-

this will be sloppy and hastily composed.

Thanks for not taking offense.

I was apologizing for the curt tone of my post. I rewrote it three times last night trying to make it sound “nicer” but it just wasn’t happening for me.

I should let you know that I live in taiwan and I speak and read pretty good chinese so I feel I have a grasp of how the language works.

broadly, what I want people to “get” is that there is nothing mysterious or inscrutable about Chinese writing and that in many ways it is much more like sound-based alphabetic writing than most people realize.

I think I did a good job of explaining how the langauge works above. If there is part of it that you don’t understand, I can help explain some of the specialized terminology etc.

Now, you are right about the nonlinearity of chinese in the very limited sense that each syllable is represented by a separate character. Beyond this, chinese is more or less like English, a system for recording spoken language, and individual characters signify only to the extent that individual spoken syllables do so (as they sometimes do in english as well). However i must insist that as with english, the vast majority of the chinese lexicon is in fact multisyllabic and so in some sense “linear.”

A caveat: the above generalization is complicated by certain literary habits of the chinese but please take my word for it that it is broadly true. :smiley:

I want to throw something else in here. There is a simple test I can show you later proving that we do not process alphabetic writing linearly but rather in “word chunks.” I will post it later.

Now as for the zen masters, I do not know what they claim about Chinese. Maybe you can tell me.

I will be sceptical of what you say, however. I do not take chinese philosophy seriously.

Also, Hassidic kabbalists and Sufi mystics claim a lot of things about the mystical properties of the hebrew and arabic alphabets, but that doesn’t mean we have to take them seriously either -though they are an entertaining read :smiley:

Also, both you and McLuhan are wrong to claim that chinese is either pictograph or ideographic, because the definition of an ideograph/ pictograph = a picture that signifies without a sound component.

And again, the main point of my post was that McLuhan is talknig out of his own ass re: chinese writing and that makes me wary of taking him seriously on other topics.

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beautifulspam,
Thanks for your response. I get testy also when trying to explain biological processes to persons who know little or nothing about them, but have made up their minds as to what they include or exclude. Since you are from Taiwan, your knowledge of Chinese writing is not up for debate. So I will not throw in any philosophic or religious interpretatations gleaned from Western translations. I am interested in your take on “word chunks”.
Several here suggest that McLuhan, although wrong in certain statements, is right in others. Can you buy that? Also, aren’t you somewhat pissed that the U.S., in order to keep peace and profits, would probably not back your island against any attacks from the mainland?

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Irellius, thanks but when I said that I speak pretty good chinese, that is what I meant. Only pretty good. I am not a native speaker but I have lived here for years, my chinese is at a pretty high level of fluency and I am engaged to a taiwanese girl, so i guess i have gone native to some extent though I still think of myself as an American.

I would still be interested in hearing what you have to say about chinese philosophy.

As for your question re: taiwanese separatism, for most expats living in taiwan, taiwanese politics is one long childish shouting match between two equally ridiculous parties. Same goes for the so called cross-strait dialogue. Here’s a typical scene, I think from the legislative assembly:

youtube.com/watch?v=pnR-BAhA2WE

This happens all the time.

As for the test, have to eat a bit of crow here. I messed around with a scrambling program using longer less familiar words as input and the result was much harder to read tahn i anticipated. anyway, here it is.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’tmttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnttihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can bea toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs isbcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as awlohe. ceehiro

Here’s one i scrambled myself.

Ttruh idened cmae ocne itno the wlrod wiih her dviine Mseatr, and was a pcfreet sahpe msot gruolois to look on: but wehn he andesecd, and his Aspletos aetfr him wree liad aelesp, tehn sthgarit aosre a wkiced rcae of driveeecs, who heewd her lvoley from itno a tonahsud pceeis, and sreactted tehm to the fuor wdins.