THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

In this week’s lecture we were talking about Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement of “The medium is the message”. This proved to be quite daunting because for the last couple of weeks we had just been learning about memes. Sitting in the lecture listening to Ted explain the concept on the “The medium is the message” blew me away at just how deep and meaningful conversation is and the medium that goes with the message communicated.

The term “The medium is the message” refers to the subject of how the information is received is determined by the way in which the message is presented. This could be anything, ranging from a t-shirt to a text message from someone. Interpretation is everything when it comes to communication. A good example of this would be Mcluhan’s book named “The medium is the massage” not the “The medium is the message”. A lot of people would look over that sentence and interpret it as “The medium is the message” because it makes sense and people tend to read things in their mind that makes sense without thinking twice about whether the word is spelt wrong or differently. 

“Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message.” Is a great quote said by Mcluhan which represents that mediums contain an independent message to the message being intentionally told. The medium also has its own unique effect on the audience and creates its own message to be interpreted and decoded by the consumer. 

Sources 

Smashing Magazine. 2020. The Medium Is The Message — Smashing Magazine. [online] Available at: <https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/the-medium-is-the-message/&gt; [Accessed 23 March 2020].

Marshallmcluhan.com. 2020. Commonly Asked Questions About Mcluhan – The Estate Of Marshall Mcluhan. [online] Available at: <https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/&gt; [Accessed 23 March 2020].

The logic of digital production and the network economy

This week we continued along the traces of Marshall’s McLuhan’s studies with the key focus of the week’s lecture being based around how mediums are extensions of ourselves. However this week we dived deeper into the internet and industrial paradigms and the key differences between legacy media and emergent media. Legacy media is media that audiences can only engage with the final product. The writers and producers of the content are able to filter their content to allow only specific information they want to be seen by their audiences. They also have complete control over the distribution of their content. This form of media is prone to propaganda and manipulation and has a high risk of failure due to the high cost required to ideate, produce and distribute the content. Emergent media acquires hardly any filters, low production cost and distributing as well as having the audience participate in all the steps required. 

Throughout the lecture Ted showed us examples of the industrial paradigm and that products produced must have no iteration and experimentation. The products are all conceptualised before starting. The internet paradigm however allows for changes to be made during the process of making the product. For example updates, which shows that iteration is a feature of the internet paradigm. An example of this that Ted gave us was that gmail was released in beta and they allowed for people’s criticism and feedback before the full version was completed.