Week 9 – The medium is the massage by Michael McLuhan

MESSAGE!  MESSAGE NOT MASSAGE! MESSAGE!

Massage: the typo in the title retained by McLuhan as if to prove the point entirely. That point being, of course, that medium in which the message is delivered is more important than the message itself. Immediately alarm bells ring. The content is unimportant? Should be disregarded?

A moment of further analysis will realise that the message McLuhan is conveying cannot be that easily trivialised into the sound bite newspeak. If one were to attempt to compress McLuhan’s actual message, you may end up concluding with something more akin to: The method of communication has more of an effect on history than one particular message. Not as catchy however much easier to relate too and understand.

The main example used to explain McLuhan’s thought process is the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century. Suddenly information could be ‘mass’ produced. No longer was the written word only the reserve of the aristocracy and clergy. It is widely regarded that the printing press was the medium of the reformation throughout 16th Century Europe, a defining moment of the evolution of western culture. And yet many of us could not recall any of the messages or arguments which informed it.

McLuhan goes on to discuss the difference between what he calls ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ mediums. Media such as letters or spoken word were classed as ‘hot’ because they require an amount of engagement and interaction from the receiving party. Whereas television would be classed in the McLuhan rolodex as ‘cold’ as it can be consumed completely passively. Architecturally a similar distinction could be made between a hand drawn set of plans, where every single mark has had to be fully considered before being committed to paper, and an easily editable CAD drawing. Or possibly how a more abstract perspective can actually say more than a VRay photorealistic render.

McLuhan didn’t live to see the manifestation of the ‘Global Village’ he hypothesised. Known to you and I as the internet, or more accurately the world wide web. Just as in the 15&16th centuries the printing press transformed the way information was distributed, the internet or specifically social media has transformed the world. Whether to help fuel the Arab Spring in 2010/11 or to use targeted propaganda to install a pantomime villain as the ‘leader of the free world’ (the phrase American Presidents use as tobacco at moments their arse doesn’t contain the adequate amount of smoke). But where does social media fit into McLuhan’s system? Advertising and video are very obviously cold mediums yet one can interact with them through the comments which accompany any post. The more the social aspects of social media are used the further the temperature rises. And whilst I find the concept of describing a medium as luke-warm amusing social media seems to be the power culmination of the McLuhan world.


To draw to a close the discussion there is very large hole in the McLuhan theory, without the message there is no media. At the end of the day the medium is only ever a distribution network, and as with all modern distribution networks, it is becoming infinitely more complex and is able to allow ideas to reach many more people. So in an attempt to close in a statement akin to McLuhan’s: The medium is the macro, message the micro.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 7: Professor Otto Silenus in ‘Decline and Fall’ by Evelyn Waugh

The day before my 19 th birthday, in the long thin final monuments to modernism that made up the studios of England’s most northern school of Architecture, I was perched on a table surrounded by peers yet unknown. The event marked the beginning of the end for any hope I had of living the life of a fully functioning normal member of society. The glass was shattered, or maybe more it was the initial first effort required to move lock mechanism allowing the gates to begin to be prized open. Addressing a room of fresh faced, architecturally innocent and naïve first year students, the head of the faculty of the built environment welcomed us with words which have come to haunt and follow me ever since. “Architecture is a disease! It may take time, but eventually throughout studying it, you will catch it and there is no cure for it.” Nervous laughter rippled through out the room. Ha! What a fantastic line. But obviously it’s just buildings, right? The knowing smirk across the face to...
Read more

Week 4: A Home in the Neon – ‘Air Guitar’ by Dave Hickey

“Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here and travelling out of here, this most un homelike of cities has become to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line… - as a home, in other words.” Within the first paragraph I can already feel alienated to Hickey’s views. ‘The moral bottom-line’ is not a description I would ever attribute to a home. Whilst he talks of refuge and the references to sanctuary and reassurances chime, a suggestion of the concept of home is you at your worst is troubling. I would describe a true home as an extension to the physical structure. A world full of memory and sentiment, almost a shrine to your ideas, history and aspiration. The place where ‘you’ are at your most ‘you’. A home should be a place where you can leave the darkness at the door, leave elements of your life which challenge the bottom line of your morality. However, in Hickey’s world as he writes as an art critic in the ‘super virtuous high culture of the nineteen nineties’ ...
Read more

Week 6: Jane Rendell - Occupying Architecture (1998) 'doing it, (un) doing it, (over) doing it yourself- Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse'

The context in which Rendell began to explore what ‘doing’ Architecture really means cannot be ignored. At the end of the 1990s, as my earliest memories begin to form, Architecture was even more male dominated than it is today. A profession which in a practical sense had barely changed since the 1960s was beginning to finally enter the information age in earnest as only now was the CAD and modelling systems which are relied on so heavily in today’s society becoming common place. So with a strong feminist movement beginning to rise on the back of ‘Girlpower’ in popular culture (although more and more so this movement is being critiqued into todays media), and maybe more importantly the rise of the most revered female architect, Zaha Hadid, we have the young Jane Rendell comes forward with a radical set of ideas for a profession only just starting to invite change. Rendell’s concept of ‘doing’ architecture, un-doing architecture and then maybe more interestingly the reaction and inter...
Read more