Professor Howard B. Siegel, Ph.D., was a clinical psychologist who taught in the Department of Education at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, in the latter half of the 20th century. Near the beginning of his career, in 1973, he published an article the Journal of Experimental Education that compared the effectiveness of “various mass media” in conveying a lesson in Gestalt theory to college students. Students in different conditions–some heard the lecture in a traditional classroom format, others received printed lectures notes, a third group watched it on video, and a fourth group listened to an audio recording–varied in terms of how well they did on a test of the material, both immediately after the lecture and in a follow-up test a few months later. The group with the printed notes did best and the audio group did the worst; the classroom and videotape groups fell in between, and each did about as well the other. “The general findings,” Siegel reported, “give no support to McLuhan’s theory that the medium is the message” (p. 68).
Did Siegel prove McLuhan wrong? Not exactly.
