Is The Medium The Massage?
- “The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.” (p. 100, McLuhan).
- The Machine Is Us/ing Us
Break
Visual Telephone
Group Work On Synthesis Projects
Show Notes:
Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1)
For Next Week:
Synthesis Project Due Next Week. No Reading or Blog Posting required this week.
Zach Lonsinger says
Howdy class, I’m kind of bummed out I missed this class, but Dean was cool enough to record it for me and lucky for me, I had a 2.5 hour drive home from Hershey today to listen to it. So I wanted to add a few thoughts I had from the class discussion:
1. the medium – I thought the conversation/debate in class was fascinating. It was super interesting to listen to class via an audio recording about a discussion between whether or not a TV show viewed on Netflix was the same as being viewed on television. I was living your discussion as I listened to it, but I didn’t get to participate in the conversation (unless you count me having a conversation with my phone). I want to add a new perspective to this complex topic. Watching a TV show on television is completely different than watching that same TV show on Netflix or even if you DVR-ed on your TV, especially in today’s culture. Take for example The Walking Dead. There is an entire world going on on twitter and AMC Story Sync that you can participate in if you want. Or you can choose to not participate, which in essence you are participating through non-participation (but not getting into that right now, haha). If you record the show, you are missing out on that aspect of the show, which almost is part of the entertainment today.
2. the message – I liked where the discussion went and I think it was Brad that said “the content is not the message” and I couldn’t agree more. One example I thought of was a recent story I heard about Steve Jobs. He didn’t try to get buy-in with the iPhone by standing up in front of a group of people and delivering the content (the iPhone). He didn’t say “here is $188 worth of parts”. Instead, he delivered the “dream” of the iPhone – the message. He delivered simple. Streamlined. I’m not sure if this example relates, but it sounded better in my head – so I’ll let you pick this apart.
3. Visual Telephone – And last but not least, this seemed to be a really cool concept. I hope we get to do it again (with storybooks, haha). I also wanted to add that it was pretty funny listening to everybody try to figure out which card was who’s – which kind of plays into this week’s theme of visualizing something through a different medium. Same game, but I couldn’t participate, but I still consumed what was happening…
Brad Kozlek says
Zach, I am glad you were able to eavesdrop from afar. So fortuitous that we were talking about the effects of different media for the week you listened in on the recording. McCluhan describes how the content of on medium is always in something in another medium. In essence our face to face conversation was wrapped in the recording for delivery to you.
I’ll ask you this: In your jobs example, what is the medium?
Zach Lonsinger says
Hey Brad, when I heard of this example, the medium was f-2-f, or more or less a pitch in front of stakeholders. But the medium could also be a commercial for the iPhone, or even Apple. What is the message of this commercial? What is the content?