NAME: OLAJIDE SUNDAY ADEBOWALE

MATRIC: 134072040
DEPT: MASS COMMUNICATION
LEVEL: HND I
COURSE: INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND WORLD PRESS
(MAC 342)
THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE, THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION BY MARSHALL
MCLUHAN THAT IS MORE CONFUSING THAN CONFUSION. CLEARLY
EDUCATE A KINDERGARTEN WHAT HE IS TRYING TO EXPLAIN

Introduction
"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." (McLuhan 7) Thus begins the classic
work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his
enigmatic paradox, "The medium is the message." But what does it mean? How can the
medium be its own message?
McLuhan's Message
Calling media "the extensions of man," McLuhan based his theory on the fact that content
follows form, and the insurgent technologies give rise to new structures of feeling and thought,
new manners of perception. He saw media as "make happen agents" rather than "make-aware"
agents, as systems "similar to roads and canals, not as precious art objects or uplifting models of
behavior, and he repeatedly reminds his readers that his proposition is best understood as a
literary trope, not as scientific theory" ("Wisdom of St. Marshall" 124). Delighting in the power
of the pun, he constantly cites as his authorities the modernist idols of the Age of Print and
quotes at length from the novels of James Joyce, particularly Finnegans Wake, and the poems of
T.S. Eliot and William Blake, and the letters of John Ruskin.
McLuhan riddled his work and his everyday parlance with word-play, and became notorious for
firing quips at his opponents such as: "You think my fallacy is all wrong?" According to this
relentless deconstructionist, the pun is a "breakdown as breakthrough." The pun breaks down the
movement of normal language revealing that something has been repressed. In other words, the
pun is a breakthrough to reality when it breaks down some expected movement. McLuhan turns
all literary techniques for crossing different kinds of discourse into different ways of grasping
reality and uses all of them most effectively as devices to probe media. He applied this poetic
alienation of language to his formula for addressing two things that our civilization (especially
today) is concerned about --- the alienation of the self and the alienating influence of technology.
In a Playboy interview from March, 1969, McLuhan said:
My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological
environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather
than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as
means of insight, of pattern recognition... I want to map new terrain rather than chart old
landmarks... Needless to say, McLuhan, himself, was disturbed by his experience of alienation
from new media --- he was alarmed as much as he was intrigued by it. His interest lay, as I said
earlier, not in promoting media, but in making the public aware of media's overwhelming effects.
And he drew the attentions of a vast audience through his positions as professor, author , and
cultural critic. McLuhan's major works included The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man, The Medium is the Massage --- his only bestseller, which combines
word and image in a way that transformed his readership's expectations of what a book should be
--- and his posthmously published work, The Global Village. The lasting themes of his works ---
the ones that interest us most today --- revolve around the two quantum leaps in communications
technology which I explore in this thesis. As Lewis Lapham explains in his introduction to
Understanding Media
Beginning with the premise that 'we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and
thereafter our tools shape us,' McLuhan examines the diktats of two technological revolutions
that overthrew a settled political and aesthetic order: first, in the mid-fifteenth century, the
invention of printing with moveable type, which encouraged people to think in straight lines and
to arrange their perception of the world in forms convenient to the visual order of the printed
page; second, since the late nineteenth century, the new applications of electricity (telegraph,
telephone, television, computers, etc.), which taught people to rearrange their perception of the
world in ways convenient to the protocols of cyberspace.
How can the medium be its own message
Of all the Internet searches that end up at the McLuhan Program website and weblog, the search
for the meaning of the famous "McLuhan Equation" is the most frequent. Many people presume
the conventional meaning for "medium" that refers to the mass-media of communications - radio,
television, the press, the Internet. And most apply our conventional understanding of "message"
as content or information. Putting the two together allows people to jump to the mistaken
conclusion that, somehow, the channel supersedes the content in importance, or that McLuhan
was saying that the information content should be ignored as inconsequential. Often people will
triumphantly hail that the medium is "no longer the message," or flip it around to proclaim that
the "message is the medium," or some other such nonsense. McLuhan meant what he said;
unfortunately, his meaning is not at all obvious, and that is where we begin our journey to
understanding.
Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious. In
doing so, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over
long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation - be it an invention or a new idea -
many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or
at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages
and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and
experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects
of which we were entirely unaware at the outset. We sometimes call these effects "unintended
consequences," although "unanticipated consequences" might be a more accurate description.
Many of the unanticipated consequences stem from the fact that there are conditions in our
society and culture that we just don't take into consideration in our planning. These range from
cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions,
to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions. All of these dynamic processes
that are entirely non-obvious comprise our ground or context. They all work silently to influence
the way in which we interact with one another, and with our society at large. In a word (or
four),ground comprises everything we don't notice.
If one thinks about it, there are far more dynamic processes occurring in the ground than
comprise the actions of the figures, or things that we do notice. But when something changes, it
often becomes noticeable. And noticing change is the key.
McLuhan tells us that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new
invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs." (McLuhan 8) Note that it is not the
content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation
brings with it. Thus, the message of theatrical production is not the musical or the play being
produced, but perhaps the change in tourism that the production may encourage. In the case of
a specifictheatrical production, its message may be a change in attitude or action on the part of
the audience that results from the medium of the play itself, which is quite distinct from the
medium of theatrical production in general. Similarly, the message of a newscast are not the
news stories themselves, but a change in the public attitude towards crime, or the creation of a
climate of fear. A McLuhan message always tells us to look beyond the obvious and seek the
non-obvious changes or effects that are enabled, enhanced, accelerated or extended by the new
thing.
McLuhan defines medium for us as well. Right at the beginning of Understanding Media, he
tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he suggests that a hammer
extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than
our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from
within our mind out to others. Indeed, since our thoughts are the result of our individual sensory
experience, speech is an "outering" of our senses - we could consider it as a form of reversing
senses - whereas usually our senses bring the world into our minds, speech takes our sensorially-
shaped minds out to the world.
But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile
potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium -
this extension of our body or senses or mind - is anything from which a change emerges. And
since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions,
innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.
Thus we have the meaning of "the medium is the message:" We can know the nature and
characteristics of anything we conceive or create (medium) by virtue of the changes - often
unnoticed and non-obvious changes - that they effect (message.) McLuhan warns us that we are
often distracted by the content of a medium (which, in almost all cases, is another distinct
medium in itself.) He writes, "it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to
the character of the medium." (McLuhan 9) And it is the character of the medium that is its
potency or effect - its message. In other words, "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."
Why is this understanding of "the medium is the message" particularly useful? We tend to notice
changes - even slight changes (that unfortunately we often tend to discount in significance.) "The
medium is the message" tells us that noticing change in our societal or cultural ground conditions
indicates the presence of a new message, that is, the effects of a new medium. With this early
warning, we can set out to characterize and identify the new medium before it becomes obvious
to everyone - a process that often takes years or even decades. And if we discover that the new
medium brings along effects that might be detrimental to our society or culture, we have the
opportunity to influence the development and evolution of the new innovation before the effects
becomes pervasive. As McLuhan reminds us, "Control over change would seem to consist in
moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force."
(McLuhan 199)



Conclusion
Perhaps McLuhan is best remembered for his assesment of the subliminal effects of the medium
--- its powers of hypnosis. He predicates his claims about the power of media on a belief in the
mutability of man. We are the content of our media. therefore our modes of perception are
unnatural. McLuhan rejects General David Sarnoff's statement that "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 that they are used that
determines their value." According to McLuhan, Sarnoff ignores the fact that the nature of the
medium, of any and all media, is to creep inside the participant unnoticed: "in the true Narcissus
style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical
form... For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction
and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance" (Understanding Media
15).

Reference
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill,.
Federman, M. (2004, July 23). What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? Retrieved
<September 28, 2014> from http://individual.utoronto.ca/mark
federman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm .
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~burgess/385/385_notes_2.pdf
http://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/the-medium-is-the-message/
Allen, J. (2011). Mixed Media: A 100th Anniversary Reappraisal