T.M.I.T.M

McLuhan

"The Media is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan is one loaded article. My initial response is severe discomfort at the statements he makes. McLuhan, according to wikipedia, is an educator, philosopher, English professor, and communication theorist. McLuhan died in 1980, and this article can still make me uneasy.

The title of the article alone is a brash statement: "The Media is the Message." This tells me that no matter what my idea or my opinion may be portraying the real message is the medium, and my own creativity takes the back seat. And I obviously would like to think that this is not true. While I agree in the point that the medium is a very important and specific choice, and I cannot disagree more that the medium is the message, it is a part of the message, but it does not take over.

In McLuhan's discourse on the electric light he says that all things that operate under the light become the content of the light. What I am writing right at this moment are my ideas, in my own words, and are passed through my nerves and make my finger muscles move and type and then the letters on my keyboard are pressed which then is processed through my laptop and appear on my computer screen. My thoughts are limited by the computer by the secondary nature of where the ideas are now captured, but they do not originate from the nerves, muscles, keyboard, computer or blogger.com, and therefore do not belong to them. And yes, my message is shaped by my medium, but in the same sense that water is shaped by the container that it resides in. The water will not lessen, or become the object, but will adapt.

McLuhan makes some interesting claims about Shakespeare, and the economy, but the one statement that really stood out to me was this, "...our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us..." What bothers me, is that media is now considered a human sense, a new way of perceiving. I do not perceive with my computer, but my mind and my sight and my independent thoughts.

I don't want to post any videos in this blog post, or make any links, because I want to make the point that I can explain myself and my ideas without the full extent of the medium. My ideas are not just a blog.