"The Medium Is The Message”

“The Medium Is The Message”: to what extent is McLuhan’s maxim still a useful framework for understanding media today? Outline McLuhan’s approach to media and discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media form not discussed in detail in the lectures or required readings.

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The extensions of Man, a well-known book written in 1964 which analyses the relationships that humans have with different types of media. The book also considered how interplay with various mediums affects the individual and society. Put simply, the meaning is not within the content of the message yet the form in which a message is communicated has more effect on an individual (Peterson, E 1969). This essay outlines McLuhan’s media approach and the many strengths and weaknesses to McLuhan’s aphorism as well as why McLuhan’s framework is still useful to this day by analysing media in the form of a “smartphone”.

Marshall McLuhan’s theories are still relevant in the 21st century, particularly with the rise of the internet and smartphones. McLuhan explained that technological media are extensions on the human central nervous system. “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media” (McLuhan 2001 p. 3-4). McLuhan perhaps indicated that humans and media were becoming closer together and that people were interacting more and more with different media forms and that media are “extensions of ourselves” (2001, p.7). The influence of the media shaped and modified our social world and also became an extension to man-kind. McLuhan believed we should “focus our attention on the ways each new medium disrupts tradition and reshapes social life” (Croteau & Hoynes, p.307).

McLuhan did not live to see the internet ‘boom’ however, his theories about technology acting as extensions on the human can still be useful in understanding technology today in the form of smartphones. Smartphones can be made up of many different media forms accessible by internet such as books, streaming videos, images games and more (Adam 2016). We understand that individuals must interact with each other by engaging through different media forms. A physical aspect is also included where users have to use a mouse button or touch screen physically allowing for the connection between audiences and the medium to become more interconnected, allowing audiences to interact on a deeper level which in turn, allows the medium to become an extension of those individuals (Adam 2016).

Perhaps Marshall McLuhan’s most known critic was Raymond Williams, a welsh cultural studies theorist who accused McLuhan of being a technological determinist. Williams believed that McLuhan did not give humans any agency and no credit for the impact they can have on the world. The focus of technology erases the social conditions. “If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself” (Williams 1974, p.131). Meaning that technology is the main force for social change (Balka 2000). McLuhan’s analysis was lacking to account for the workings of “power, political economy, institutional organization, and everyday life” according Williams. (Groswiler 1999). Due to McLuhan believing we should only focus on the medium and not the intent, we are eradicating the initial intention which was hoping to be communicated.

McLuhan was suggested to have become “a kind of bogeyman of technological determinism” (Jeffery 1989). Marshall McLuhan and David Sarnoff also disagreed radically with each other with their beliefs on technology. Sarnoff believing “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” (2001, p.11). Therefore, technology is not bad, however the way we use it can be bad. McLuhan responded to Sarnoff’s claims and argued that he ignores the “nature of the medium, of any and all media” (2001, p.11).

McLuhan’s tetrad model helps to analyse media in the form of mobile smart phones. The tetrad is combined of four divisions including enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. Firstly, smart phones enhance the ability to access the internet conveniently due to its light-weight and size. The access and usage of the internet in our society today can be argued by its importance with McLuhan’s beliefs of media being extensions of the body (thus including the smartphone due to its use for the internet) since the internet can be seen as an extension of our memory explains Adam (2016). Bohannon (2011 p.277) suggests that “people use the internet as a personal memory bank”, which he names the “Google-effect”. People use the internet and devices such as smartphones to answer questions instead of relying on their own knowledge. Bohannon explains that people don’t wish to remember things if they can simply look them up. In addition, social media is used to share memories which creates a memory collective (Adam 2016).

Due to the increasing popularity of smart phones, the ‘normal’ mobile phones are becoming increasingly obsolete (Adam 2016). The number of sales have decreased and the market for these phones has diminished (Adam 2016). The smartphone also sees the personal computer (PC) “take a backseat” (Adam 2016). The smartphones of our generation can function almost like a computer and imitates many of the PC’s functions however, the smartphone has not made the PC completely obsolete as many students and academics as well as people in the workforce still require them.

Smartphones are able to retrieve differing media which in the past, had lost importance (Adam 2016). The camera, for example is always a feature of smartphones often with users forgetting the previous ways in which to use a camera. In the past, people would own cameras but would not necessarily take them everywhere they went (Adam 2016). Unlike now, almost every second person owns an smartphone meaning they are constantly carrying a camera with them too. People are using their smartphones as cameras and are able to take photos/videos whenever they please.

If the smartphone was reversed, it would perhaps be into a form that restricted communication and interaction with other humans. It is very common these days to see groups of people all staring at their smart phones instead of interacting with each other. Adam also discusses that there is an increasing habit in heavy and moderate smartphone users feeling significantly more anxious overtime is separated from their smartphones (Adam 2016). This phenomenon is named “nomophobia”, an abbreviation of “no-mobile-phone phobia” (Adam 2016).

In conclusion, Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” aims to promote the idea that media forms themselves can reshape society. There were clear strengths and weaknesses to his theory with weaknesses identified by Raymond Williams and David Sarnoff. Although McLuhan’s theory neglects the significance or importance of an intended message, keeping the focus on the medium itself, it can still be a useful framework for understanding media to this day in the context of smartphones and their facilitating ability to be used as cameras and for the internet.

References

Adam, I 2016, ‘What Would McLuhan Say about the Smartphone? Applying McLuhan’s Tetrad to the Smartphone’, Glocality, accessed 25 April 2018, <https://www.glocality.eu/articles/10.5334/glo.9/print/>

Balka, E 2000, ‘Rethinking ‘The Medium is the Message’: Agency and Technology in McLuhan’s writings’ Media International Australia, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 73-87

Bohannon, J 2011, ‘Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory’, Psychology, vol. 333, no. 1, pp. 277

Gibson, T 2008, ‘Double Vision: McLuhan's Contributions to Media as an Interdisciplinary Approach to Communication, Culture, and Technology’, Mediatropes, vol.1 , no.1, pp.143-166

Grosswiler, P 1999, ‘The Method is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan Through Critical Theory’, Shaw, vol.29, no.1

McLuhan, M 2001, The medium is the message, Routledge, London

Williams, Raymond (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London and New York, Routledge