The Medium is the Massage
When I started reading and listening to the assignments for this week, I had a really difficult time trying to wrap my head around the phrase “the medium is the message”. Clearly it was the focus of the selections and would somehow tie into the concept of harmony when we discussed it in class but I still didn’t see how. What was “the medium” and how could it also be “the message”? McLuhan didn’t expressly state it in the selection from his book, but I think I was able to figure out what he was trying to say. He was clearly focused on the emergence of new technologies, even back in the 1960s, and he knew that people would quickly turn these new things into mediums for self-expression and further creation. So if new technology (television, the Internet) is the medium, then what could be the message? Rather than focus on the content when looking for a message, look within the medium itself. When it comes to message, what the content is saying doesn’t matter, but how people feel because of it. McLuhan asserts that how a technology is being used and what it does to those who see it is the crux of this “medium is the message” idea.
I later reviewed the Powerpoint to see how these selections could apply to the themes of harmony. I listened with headphones on and quickly heard that the sound channels were split (the words and music were played in different ears). The actual attention to where the listener would hear the words or music helped stress its importance based on location, which not many people think about when it comes to audio. This also adds to the emphasis and importance of certain lines, being isolated in one ear versus going through both. Besides this, the selections are also harmonious because of how well McLuhan mixed the varying styles of music and spoken word.
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