East Tennessee State University Medium of Exchange Discussion Number 3 did not really answer the message.
Number 2 used very complex references that you need to explain better in your own words.
Number 4 you used McLuhan’s words without explaining them in your own words.
Redo number 2,3 and 4 if you want to improve your grade. In your own words is important. Rather have a grammatical error then someone else’s words.
ASSIGNMENT
After carefully reading the attached document and carefully reading the articles linked to in this message, carefully and thoughtfully answer the following.Notice I used the word “carefully” a lot and also included “thoughtfully.” Now why would I do that?
1. In your own words, describe the meaning of “The Medium is the Message” in such a way that McLuhan would say, “you got it, you accurately simplified my complex topic through your careful reading and deep analysis.”
2.When McLuhan says “the medium is the message” is he referring to an entire medium, a specific platform or a specific content producer?
3.In our multimedia environment where many companies are utilizing a range of media to communicate its message, how much does the same message on different media have its message changed by the medium?
4.If a theory is an explanation of a phenomenon, what phenomenon is McLuhan studying or explaining?
PLEASE LONG RESPONSES TO THE QUESTIONS, AT LEAST 5/6 LINES EACH QUESTION.
YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION, BUT FIRST YOU HAVE TO READ THE PDF ATTACHED. Then Answer the questions, you can have help from internet but not too much, and if you use something please put sources and everything.
LOOK AT THE RESPONE OF MY TEACHER AND CHANGE 2,4 AND 4 AND PUT IT IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
YOU HAVE TWO FILES, THE FILE WITH THE RESPONSES AND THE ACTUAL PDF THAT YOU HAVE TO READ TO CHANGE THE QUESTIONS. 1
Running Head: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Medium of exchange
Name
University Affiliation
2
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Question 1 Answer
Medium is the Message’ in my own words means a systematic and ultimate way of getting
attention. For instance, the invention of the mobile phone changed the means through which
people get care. By a simple call from, let’s say an employer, the user of the telephone, pays
much attention to the phone and expecting the message. Does an individual value the phone in
itself? No, a person spends more valuation on the news or the information passed by the caller,
as such information is what makes the differences in the deal being made. That is why the
‘medium is the message’ can be described as the unique way of getting attention.
Question 2 Answer
When McLuhan says, “the medium is the message,” is he was not referring to an entire medium.
He was referring to any form of new technology, amplification or extension of human faculties
whenever they are given embodiment. They will tend to create a unique and new environment.
The same concept applies to what is known as the clothing of speech, wheel or script….it is an
interplay formation between the new and the old situation that eventually generates a series of
confusions and problems. This is because the environment through which people live is
imperceptible concerning the changing terms of its contents. However, it is notable that there is a
frequent alteration of the entire character of a human being from time to time. There is the
however massive ignoring of the human sensibility and the sensory ratios. As such, the medium
of exchange is not the entire medium based on the above analysis of the McLuhan perspective.
Generally speaking, McLuhan believes that each new technology leads to the creation of an
environment that is regarded as degrading and corrupt. However, the new environment turns its
predecessors into a unique art form.
Question 3 Answer
The current multimedia environment involves a situation where the companies utilize a wide
range of media communicates its messages. There is a different magnitude through which the
word changes given the transmission of various mediums. For example, the system of the
message used can lead to losing value in message due to forms of delay. For example, the old
ways of transmitting signals such as postal cooperation led to serial delays. Therefore, whenever
the message was urgent and such means are used, it will facilitate the delays. With the invention
of new technology, there has been faster transmitting of messages leading to the faster-acting
upon the words hence leading to conveniences.
Question 4
I believe that McLuhan was trying to explain the genesis of the medium of exchange. He was
trying to link the relationship between the concept of the message and how such a message can
be transmitted in new forms in what is commonly known as the medium of exchange. He was
referring to any form of new technology, amplification or extension of human faculties whenever
they are given embodiment, they will tend to create a unique and new environment.
3
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Reference
McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the message. New York, 123, 126-128.
From
Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man
by Marshall McLuhan
©1964
CHAPTER 1
The Medium is the Message
MARSHALL McCLUHAN
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a
means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the
personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example,
the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs it is true. That is the
negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say
depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it
was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or
message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one
another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped
by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The
essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in
depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection.
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were,
unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all
media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The
content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and
print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?,”
it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.” An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here,
however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they
amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or
technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human
affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road
into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human
functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.
This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environ-
ment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The
airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of
what the airplane is used for.
Let us return to the electric light. Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the “content” of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale
and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are
as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed,
it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of
the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various
kinds of business in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it was not
in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in
the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.
The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from
electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as
much as A.T.&T., it is in the business of moving information.
The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it
has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to
study media at all.
For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is
noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the “content” (or what is really
another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For
electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and
space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and
TV, creating involvement in depth.
A fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made
up from selections from Shakespeare. Some might quibble about whether or not he
was referring to TV in these familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It speaks, and yet says nothing.
In Othello, which, as much as King Lear, is concerned with the torment of people
transformed by illusions, there are these lines that bespeak Shakespeare’s intuition
of the transforming powers of new media:
Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abus’d? Have you not read Roderigo,
Of some such thing?
2
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to
both a psychic and social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation:
The providence that’s in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus’ gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.
The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their
“content” or programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza:
In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn’t act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch.
The same kind of total, configurational awareness that reveals why the medium is socially the message has occurred in the most recent and radical medical
theories. In his Stress of Life, Hans Selye tells of the dismay of a research
co11eague on hearing of Selye’s theory:
When he saw me thus launched on yet another enraptured description of
what I had observed in animals treated with this or that impure, toxic material, he looked at me with desperately sad eyes and said in obvious despair:
“But Selye try to realize what you are doing before it is too late! You have
now decided to spend your entire life studying the pharmacology of dirt!”
(Hans Selye, The Stress of Life)
As Selye deals with the total environmental situation in his “stress” theory of
disease, so the latest approach to media study considers not only the “content” but
the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates.
The older unawareness of the psychic and social effects of media can be illustrated
from almost any of the conventional pronouncements.
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few
years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make
technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The
products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they
are used that determines their value.” That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the
way it is used that determines its value.” Or, “The smallpox virus is in itself neither
good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Again, “Firearms
are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines
their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV
3
tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for
it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus
style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new
technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of
print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had
also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has
never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add
itself on to what we already are.
Such economists as Robert Theobald, W. W. Rostow, and John Kenneth Galbraith have been explaining for years how it is that “classical economics” cannot
explain change or growth. And the paradox of mechanization is that although it is
itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented
parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no
principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts
for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all
reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant.
With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as
they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a
chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.
Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible
on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an
apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just
as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The
movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence
and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations. It is the transition that produced the now quite correct observation: “If it
works, it’s obsolete.” When electric speed further takes over from mechanical
movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud
and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon.
To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of
triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy. It was at this moment of
the movie that cubism occurred and it has been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art
and Illusion) as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce
one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.”
For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of
view” or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third
4
dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or
dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that “drives home the message” by
involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion.
In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back,
and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor
of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total
awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident
that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the
structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in
painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have
shifted to total field, and we can now say, “The medium is the message” quite
naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the “content,” as people used to
ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was
about, nor what a house or a dress was about. In such matters, people retained
some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity. But in the electric
age this integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent that
educational theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working with specialized
“problems” in arithmetic, the structural approach now follows the lines of force in
the field of number and has small children meditating about number theory and
“sets.”
Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the grammar of gunpowder.” Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the
semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies. He is on
record for saying that “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of coming change in France and
America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him. In
fact, the nineteenth century in France and in America was just such an open book
to de Tocqueville because he had learned the grammar of print. So he, also, knew
when that grammar did not apply. He was asked why he did not write a book on
England, since he knew and admired England. He replied:
One would have to have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always seemed
to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United States properly,
and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In America all laws derive in a sense
from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak, is
founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle.
One could compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight
roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and
5
everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross,
and it is only by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a
picture of the whole.
De Tocqueville in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it
was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century,
had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people
from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.
In England, however, such was the power of the ancient oral traditions of
common law, backed by the medieval institution of Parliament, that no uniformity
or continuity of the new visual print culture could take complete hold. The result
was that the most important event in English history has never taken place;
namely, the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution. The American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart
from monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency has become
very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could
be.
De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on
the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral commonlaw tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture.
The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwrit…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment