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.
First of all, wouldn’t the fact that different media produce different results in terms of retention and recall support McLuhan? In other words, if the effects of a “message” (in this case, lecture content) vary based on its mode of delivery, doesn’t that mean that the medium is what matters?
Siegel reasons in this way. He notices that the relative level of performance—print best, “live” lecture and videotape tied in the middle, audio worst—is different than the order of effectiveness observed in other, similar studies, including one cited by McLuhan. He thinks this is probably because the subject of the lecture—Gestalt theory—”places a great emphasis on perception and is, therefore, highly visual” (p. 70). The other studies involved less visually oriented material and thus produced different results. “This finding implies that content very much influences the effectiveness of the mass media,” he concludes (p. 70).
But I think this misunderstands what McLuhan is talking about. There’s a difference between effectiveness (understood here as the delivery of content to a receptive audience which then is able to recall that content; this reflects what communication scholars call the “silver bullet” or “hypodermic” model of communication) and effect (understood to be a way of thinking about the world, or the priority afforded particular senses, which is what McLuhan was interested in).
More importantly, a medium is more than a technological mode of delivery; it includes the social and economic orderings in which the technology is embedded. So the mass medium in question isn’t “audio recording” or “print”–it’s the university classroom, with its transmission-model cycle of lecture-to-exam learning. Siegel hasn’t varied that, so his study doesn’t really speak to McLuhan at all.
But it shows how easy it is to misconstrue what McLuhan meant.
References
Siegel, Howard B. “McLuhan, Mass Media, and Education.” Journal of Experimental Education. Vol. 41, no. 3: 68-70 (Spring 1973).