Toronto School
Revisited: Is The Medium Really The Message?
“It doesn’t
matter much what you say on the telephone. The telephone as a service is a huge
environment and that is a medium. And the environment affects everybody. What
you say on the telephone affects very few, and the same as in radio and other
medium.”
That was Marshall
McLuhan in 1977 explaining “The Medium Is the Message” to an audience on the Monday
Conference on ABC TV.[1] Marshall
McLuhan was one of the forerunners of the Toronto School of communication
theory, who considered the medium itself is the message, in a broader sense
than just print or electronics like television – an environment. So even the
light bulb can be a medium[2]
because it has a huge effect on people. The term faced so many criticisms at that
time, but they couldn’t have known that thirty years later the electronic media
would allow no space and time barriers, and that it will have so much impact on
the human society. This essay will probe into concept of ‘the medium is the message’,
not to prove it right or wrong but rather to try to make sense out of it in the
twenty-first century context.
The Medium is
the Message
Such an
outrageous thought, one might say. Can a book still be a “book” without the
words? How could a television send “a message” without a program? The
answer, by McLuhan himself, is:
“What you print
is nothing compared to the effect of the printed words. The printed
word sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which affects everybody in
very, very drastic ways and it doesn’t matter what you print as long as you go
on in that form of activity.”
McLuhan. Monday Conference
on ABC TV - June 27, 1977.
McLuhan spoke of
the medium as a paradigm, a structure of awareness, an ‘environment’ that creates
a strong impact on a large scale of audience. McLuhan’s medium, therefore, refers
(but not limited) to a book, newspaper, radio, television, telephone, film, Web
Site, or email (Griffin, 2009[3]).
And it is the ‘experience’ of the medium itself that delivers the message, not
the content. Thai soap opera consumption should epitomize how people
‘experience’ soap opera from different medium with different effects. People
read the plot from a newspaper (they really need to know the story even before
it goes on air). Reading provides the experience of imagining the story from
the letters, while the experience from actually watching it on screen is
totally different. In addition, it does not matter how the story proceeds or
ends, those who love to read or watch, still perform that activity, one soap
after another. That is the power of the medium as a message.
It was in the 1960s when McLuhan coined
the term the medium is the message. The ‘electronic media’ of the time was
television and radio (and early computer). But the electronic medium of the
twenty-first century is very different. Prints do not appear only on paper. Television
becomes wider. The invention of the World Wide Web created the “global village”
of the networked society. Media converged into one single medium, the Internet.
The bigger television screen physically expands the experience of television watching.
The ‘internet experience’ allows a person to engage in both activities –
watching television and surfing the net – at the same time. A clip of a
notorious scene from TV can be watched on the Internet. Within the Internet is
a social media. The same video clip is shared to other people. And it is
not just sharing the content. It is sharing the experience, with feelings,
since social media lets you write your thoughts on everything. Therefore, the
experience other people gain from watching that video clip on a social media
website is different than when they experience it from TV.
The
Internet, hence, creates a new paradigm. It’s not about watching; it’s about sharing
the thoughts and feelings. The Internet is a new “huge environment” that
affects everybody (who has access) tremendously.
All media has an
effect on man and society, regardless of its content.[5]
McLuhan insisted that the media affects people because of the environment and
the experience that it creates. In the fourth epoch of human history[6],
the books, according to McLuhan, were the source of all individuality and that
the new media will turn us all in to collective automata robots[7].
An epitome of this statement would be the story of 75-year-old Lucille Lofty, who
was interviewed by blogger Carole Hicks. Lofty told Hicks that her family’s
lifestyle radically changed after purchasing their first TV set in 1952[8].
The television took over the place of conversation, reading and many other
interests that they shared as a family. Lofty’s father “turned on the TV as
soon as he got up in the morning, kept it on all day and made sure he could see
it from where he ate at the kitchen table”.
The impact of
the medium today has become even more powerful than Lofty’s story with the
emergence of the Internet. The 2000s electronic era brought about the new
hi-tech gadgets that allow internet access anywhere, anytime. The gadgets
enable access to the World Wide Web, and the social media (also a new medium),
where all other medium (prints, television, film, recording music, etc.)
converge. That doubles the impact. The social media alone is such a vast
environment, rendering the experience with phenomenal effect. That is because
the social media is content plus comments; and comments are very subjective. The
effect of the social media, therefore, is like a whiplash; it starts with one person
watching something on TV and shares it on the social network with one move of a
finger. By sharing, a person also attaches his/her own comments. The clip (along
with subjective comments) then spreads to millions more people like wildfire,
accumulating emotions and arguments along the way; like a whip that starts with
a small jerk of a hand but the power increases as it travels towards the tip.
McLuhan couldn’t
have known of the World Wide Web in the early 1960s when he introduced his
thought on the medium being the message, not to mention the social media. But
he knew that the new media would eventually bring us to the Global Village[9]
or today’s networked society. It also occurs to me that the media convergence
is, in one way, the global village of the media itself; all media are
interconnected and accessible via one medium – the Internet. “The electric
media will create a world of dropouts from the old fragmented society,…and
cause people to drop in to the new integrated global-village community”,
said McLuhan in an interview with Playboy magazine back in 1969. The World Wide
Web and the network society that we are now living in just makes the statement
a goose-bumping true prophecy. The new medium, such as smartphones and
tablets, truly eliminates the boundaries of space and time. We read books from
all over the world online. We watch movies, music videos or television shows
from many countries from anywhere and anytime we like.
Does the capability of
the social media that allows anyone to publicize their minds mean that we all can
be the message?
McLuhan wrote, “In
this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the
form of information...[10]” McLuhan emphasizes that the medium is
the message; not only because the “content of any medium is another medium” but
also because any “medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human action[11]”,
and I’d rather add ‘reaction’ as well, since I think the medium can be very
manipulative of its audience.
An
article on FORBES online titled “Advertising People Are the New Advertising
Medium[12]”
posted on May 15, 2012, talked about advertising people being the “medium.” The
writer, who is in the advertising business, explained from his standpoint that
advertising people use the social media more than average people do, thus, they
become a ‘bona fide medium’. His three reasons are: they (advertising
people) have many non-advertising ‘friends’; they are motivated to share
creative things; and they tend to be the “cool people” in social circles (hence,
the cultural drivers). Thus, if the advertising people – on the social media
landscape – are the medium themselves, then they are also the message, which I
quite agree with. A message from “ad people” would have different affect than
that same message coming from non-advertising people, no matter what the
message is.
Other
Media Effects theories, such as the Cultivation theory, the Magic-Bullet
theory, and the Agenda-setting theory, may argue with McLuhan’s concept. They believe
in the powerful effects of the content of the media and not the media itself. McLuhan, however, never said that the content
did not have an effect. He merely said that, “the effect of TV, the
message of TV, is quite independent [of the programs - the content].[13]”
Conclusion
Marshall
McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message” may not seem interesting or
even possible thirty years ago. The 2000s era is proving him right. With the
World Wide Web we are now living in the Global Village and the world is interconnected.
The electronic medium has become the message, regardless of the content,
because they provide the vast experience that affects a large scale of people and
the society. The inventions of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets and other
digital communication devices undeniably extend our consciousness as they speaks
louder than their content and become more powerful.
[1] Marshall McLuhan
answered to a question on
“The
Medium Is the Message” in Monday Conference on ABC TV, on
June 27, 1977. Retrieved
January 21, 2013 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw
[2] Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, p. 8, explained that “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.” (Wikipedia. Retrieved on January 22, 2013
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message)
[3] Em Griffin. 2009. A
First Look at Communication Theory. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
[4] McLuhan,
Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
[5] Playboy
Magazine. 1969. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”. ©
Playboy. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/#.
[6] McLuhan divided
all human history into 4 periods, or epochs: the tribal age, literate age, a
print age, and an electronic age (Griffin .2009).
[7]McLuhan answered
to an audience in an open interview in 1967. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMEC_HqWlBY
[8] Lofty, Lucille.
Interview. Carole Hicks. 17 March 2008.
Retrieved on January 23, 2013 from http://carolehicks.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/televisions-impact-on-society/
[9] The term Gobal
Village was introduced in McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man (1962)
[10] Leslie Johnson. 2011. Marshall
McLuhan: How a Pre-Internet Academic Changed the Way We Think About the Web. Retrieved January 22, 2013 from
http://www.behaviourchangeandtechnology.org/2011/06/marshall-mcluhan-how-a-pre-internet-academic-changed-the-way-we-think-about-the-web/
[11]Quoted in
McLuhan, Marshall – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (2009). Thoughtjam. Retrieved January 23, 2013 from
http://thoughtjam.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/mcluhan-marshall-understanding-media-the-extensions-of-man/
[12] Will Burns. 2012. Advertising
People Are The New Advertising Medium. Forbes.
Retrieved January 22, 2013 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2012/05/15/advertising-people-are-the-new-advertising-medium/
[13] Marshall McLuhan
answered to a question from an audience after his lecture on “The
Medium Is the Message” in Monday Conference on ABC TV June
27, 1977. Retrieved January 21, 2013
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw
