Media is the message?

January 16, 2012 5:30 PM

Can someone help me understand what people mean when they say - "Media is the message" or "Media is not the message". I don't get it at all? And online searching has not helped a great deal in gaining clarity either. Thanks.
posted by gadget_gal to technology (15 answers total)

You're just mishearing it. The phrase is "the medium is the message" and it's a quote.
posted by Think_Long at 5:33 PM on January 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

Think_Long is correct. I was going to quote from the Wikipedia page that he linked to, and I guess I still will; the basic meaning of the original quote is this:

McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[2]

Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the content — and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[3]

I've never heard anyone say that the medium is not the message, but I suppose that such a quote would simply be someone disagreeing with the original phrase as coined my McLuhan.
posted by asnider at 5:35 PM on January 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

This was asked previously - some good answers there.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:38 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Think_Long is right about the proper quotation. 'Medium' means the way communication happens. Telephone is a medium. TV is a medium. The Internet is a medium. Face-to-face is a medium. The idea behind 'The medium is the message' is that the way you choose to communicate a message is as much a part of the message as the message itself. So, you have some words, "lorem ipsum for example", and if I just leave those words there on the screen I'm choosing to communicate using the medium of Text on the Internet. And in that context the message itself has a meaning.

But if I called you and spoke the words "lorem ipsum for example" to you over the phone, that would recontextualize the message within the medium it is communicated. It would be a slightly different message from the Text-on-the-Internet version, simply by having a different method of communication. If I broadcast "lorem ipsum for example" over the radio waves and millions of people heard it on their car radios in the morning spoken by a sultry woman, that particular medium affects the content of the message, even if "lorem ipsum for example" stays the same. What Marshall Mcluhan means to do is relate how a message is communicated to the meaning of the message.

The next step, if you're interested, is setting out ideas of how each medium generally affects the messages communicated via it.
posted by carsonb at 5:42 PM on January 16, 2012 [6 favorites]

One of the phrases that geeks like to use is "signal to noise ratio". The basis for it helps to elucidate McLuhan's point. A radio is just a receiver. If you have a radio but there are no available stations, all you hear is static - "noise". It is not until there is content being broadcast that there is "signal". The content may be sublime, such as a Brahms piece, or dreck - think Kardashians.

The radio system of transmitters and receivers is the medium. It may have any number of messages. But the fact that we have radio at all is a "message" in and of itself.

It is something of a mystic statement, which is why it gets such play.
posted by yclipse at 5:43 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you want alonger explaination of the phrase I suggest you read "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects", by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.
(amazon)

It's an amazing book.

*yes, it's MASSAGE
posted by ooklala at 5:49 PM on January 16, 2012

The Medium is the Massage won't really give you a better or clearer idea of what is meant. It's a great book, and worth a read, but don't read it as someone new to the concept and expecting a greater understanding. It's more of a riff on the idea, and the stream-of-consciousness style is definitely more obtuse and laden with mysterious meaning than the sort of (attempted) straightforwardness of something like McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. That's much more of a lucid take on the meanings and implications and bastardizations of "Medium is the message". Start there.
posted by carsonb at 5:54 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Put somewhat differently, what you use to get at the content (message) is often less important than what you are employing to get content because what you use alters (brain plasticity) the way in which you perceive things. Thus, using the net, or forms of electronics, is altering your brain and that is more important than what you get while using the medium. Note how
you now are skimming things, rapidly moving from place to place as you use electronics ...that is what has changed (the medium) and means more than what you "got" as message at the places you were at.
posted by Postroad at 6:01 PM on January 16, 2012

Of course, that might not help with what many people mean when they say that, since many who use the phrase know nothing of McLuhan's work.
posted by RobotHero at 6:13 PM on January 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

Relevant video.
posted by empath at 6:43 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well, "The medium is the message" also about technological development, and how that affects society.

A world where you get your news from a passing traveller as he waters his horse is a different world from
- the world where you go to the town square to read the latest proclamations and broadsheets that've been posted or
- the world where you buy your own newspaper or
- the world where you gather your family together to listen to the radio or
- the world where you connect your laptop to the internet to get the news.

The medium itself shapes your relationship to whatever the particular message is; and the medium itself is likely to be more of more importance to your life than any particular message it carries: the medium explains an awful lot about the larger society. The medium is the message.

(Or, on preview, what Postroad said, too.)
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 6:57 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

It means the context is just as important as the content.
posted by bradbane at 7:02 PM on January 16, 2012

Here's a great essay on the topic. Relevant quote from the link:

McLuhan defines medium for us as well. Right at the beginning of Understanding Media, he tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others. Indeed, since our thoughts are the result of our individual sensory experience, speech is an "outering" of our senses - we could consider it as a form of reversing senses - whereas usually our senses bring the world into our minds, speech takes our sensorially-shaped minds out to the world.

But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium - this extension of our body or senses or mind - is anything from which a change emerges. And since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.

Thus we have the meaning of "the medium is the message:" We can know the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create (medium) by virtue of the changes - often unnoticed and non-obvious changes - that they effect (message.) McLuhan warns us that we are often distracted by the content of a medium (which, in almost all cases, is another distinct medium in itself.) He writes, "it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." (McLuhan 9) And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect - its message. In other words, "This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

posted by Sticherbeast at 8:00 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

oh my goodness. This is so awesome. I have been such an ignoramus about this. Thanks all!!
posted by gadget_gal at 11:40 PM on January 16, 2012

I'm going to go off-topic here for a second, but there's an apocryphal story that when Marshall McLuhan was teaching at the University of Toronto, he arrived one morning to find that someone had parked their car in his parking space. He left a note on their windshield that said, "You have parked your car in my parking space. Please remove it, and do not park here again."

The next morning, he found his note had been placed in his mail slot with a note in reply, "Thank you Professor McLuhan. This is the first thing you ever wrote that I understand."
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:25 AM on January 17, 2012 [1 favorite]