Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan
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The Medium is the Message

• Medium ?
• Message?

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The Medium is the Message

• Medium Any extension of ourselves.
• Message The personal and social consequences of
  this extension. The message is the change of
  scale or pace or pattern that it(the medium)
  introduces into human affairs.

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The Medium is the Message.
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What about content?.
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For the content of any medium is like the juicy
piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract
the watchdog of the mind.
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Rearview-mirror view?.
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The Medium is the Message.
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The Medium is the Message.
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Narcissus trance?
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Two types of medium.

• Hot
• High Definition
• Focuses on medium.
• Low participation.
• Cool
• Low Definition.
• Focuses on the viewer.
• High participation.

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For example

• Hot
• A photograph.
• Radio.
• A lecture.
• Cool
• A cartoon.
• The telephone.
• Television.

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Raymond Williams
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Historical Materialism
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Technological Determinism(two flavors)?

• Technology as accident.
• Technology as symptom.

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Technology as Accident(Television has altered
our world)?
Television was invented as a result of scientific
and technical research

• Its power as a medium of news and entertainment
  was then so great that it altered all preceding
  media of news and entertainment.
• Its power as a medium of social communication was
  then so great that it altered many of our
  institutions and forms of social relationships.
• Its inherent properties as and electronic medium
  altered our basic perceptions of reality, and
  thence our relations with each other and with the
  world.
• and developed as a medium of entertainment and
  news. It then had unforeseen consequences, not
  only on other entertainment and news media, which
  it reduced in viability and importance, but on
  some of the central processes of family, cultural
  and social life.

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Technology as Symptom(Television has altered our
world)?

• 5. Television, discovered as a possibility by
  scientific and technical research, was selected
  for investment and development to meet the needs
  of a new kind of society, especially in the
  provision of centralized entertainment and in the
  centralized formation of opinions and styles of
  behavior.
• 6. Television, discovered as a possibility by
  scientific and technical research, was selected
  for investment and promotion as a new and
  profitable phase of a domestic consumer economy,
  it is then one of the characteristic machines of
  the home.
• 7. Television became available as a result of
  scientific and technical research, and in its
  character and uses exploited and emphasized
  elements of a passivity, a cultural and
  psychological inadequacy, which had always been
  latent in people, but which television new
  organized and came to represent.
• 8. Television became available as a result of
  scientific and technical research, and in its
  character and uses both served and exploited the
  needs of a new kind of large-scale and complex
  but atomized society.

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Technological Determinism

• What are some of the problems with this
• philosophy according to Williams?
• Do we see instances of this outlook
• elsewhere?

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In Technological Determinism

1. Each view can be seen to depend on the isolation
   of technology. It is either a self-acting force
   which creates new ways of life, or it is a
   self-acting force which provides materials for
   new ways of life.
2. Research and development are are seen as
   self-generating.
3. These views serve to mask important philosophical
   questions regarding technology.

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Williams claims there is a need

• To see a technology as being looked for, with
  certain purposes and practices already in mind.
• To see a technology as fulfilling know social
  needs.

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Development of Faradays electro-magnetic
induction Voltas battery

• Coincides with the development of industrial
  production.
• With new industrial needs such as city and house
  lighting.

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Development of telegraphy

• Coincides with the development of railways.
• The development of international trade and
  transport.

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television

• Much of the technology needed for the development
  of television existed by 1914. But there was not
  yet a social investment to bring the various
  parts together.

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television

• It was not until society became characterized by
  new scales of mobility that television was taken
  up.
• This change in mobility itself was not caused by
  new telecommunications systems but by earlier
  developments industrial production, new social
  forms, capital accumulation, and working
  technical improvements. These created new needs
  and possibilities.

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Needs?Mobility?Communication?Transmission?