[medium, media: technological extensions of our senses, which we use to communicate.]

All media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical.

The wheel, a medium for transportation, is an extension of the foot.

The book, a medium for communications, is an extension of the eye.

A microphone extends the voice, a radio your ear.

Clothing, in part a form of communication, is an extension of the skin."

McLuhan, a scholar of James Joyce who was fond of puns and poetry, is famous for saying

"THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE"

Media, by altering the environment, change our balance of sensory perception.

Extending any sense in a different alters the way we perceive the world.

As the barrage of information hitting our various senses change, people change.

Let’s briefly go back, so we can hear where we are today…

[ever wonder why the metaphor is "see" where we are, and gain "perspective"?)

Before the alphabet the dominant sense was the ear.

The educated man was someone who could recite Homer from memory.

Until post-ideographic writing was invented, man lived in circles of acoustic space, directionless, in the world of emotion, listening for sounds of both beauty and danger, attuned to primordial intuition.

There were cave drawings and talking heads, but no written words.

In tribal cultures without written language, notions of time, space and territoriality are totally different from the Euro-Western tradition. For primitive and pre-alphabet people time and space are horizonless, boundless, and multi-sensory. The Eskimo drawing of a man hunting seal on an ice floe shows what is below the ice, as well as what is in view.

Then the phonetic alphabet tilted our sensory ratio to favor the eye.

Oral languages had been like knots.

With written language, chronological, classified, segmented knowledge took over.

The letters of the alphabet are bits and pieces which are meaningless (in terms of CONTENT) in themselves. But what impact have they had upon us as FORM?

The alphabet combined fragmented bits that must be strung together bead-like in a line.

It fostered the habit of perceiving our environment in visual terms, a time and space that are uniform, continuous, and connected.

The line, the continuum, became the organizing principle of life.

The invention of the printing press confirmed and extended visual bias in Western culture.

It fostered more linear, visual thinking.

It provided the first uniformly repeatable commodity.

It provided the model for the assembly LINE and the mechanical age.

Break everything down into standard component parts led to industrialization.

Absolutely! Linear thinking became equated with rationality.

Logic became depending on sequence (from the Latin "sequor" meaning to follow).

"I don't follow you" came to mean "I don’t think what your saying is rational!"

Is the linear, sequential, "rational, logical" viewpoint always the correct path? Quantum physicists would say "no", and I suspect some advertising copywriters would agree.

The printed book also contributed to an emerging cult of individualism.

The private, fixed point of view (The Western "I") became possible and literacy conferred a power of detachment, non-involvement.

Art is shaped by the way space is perceived in a culture.

Since the renaissance, the Western artist perceived his environment in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface, accepting vertical and horizontal symmetry as an absolute condition of order. The information age would change all that.

Artists sometimes offer the first examples of a culture's changing sensory perceptions.

Picasso's early style was conventional, paintings of clowns and lovers in the Blue and Pink periods. 1906-13 it changed: he abandoned the fixed perspective that had dominated painting; "cubism" brought in many different vantage points, all angles at once, all on the canvas at the same instant.

At an accelerating pace over the last one hundred and fifty years, new communications media have continuously reshaped our sensory environment: still photography, the telegraph, motion pictures, the telephone, several generations of sound recording technology, radio, the talkies, television, instant and color photography, transistor radio, videotape, satellite communications, broadband, photocopy, fax machines, telephone answering machines, beepers, portable phones, computers, laptops, modems, e-mail and the internet, fiber optic broadband networks, digital imaging, data compression and digital storage media, wireless appliances and hybrids of these media.

Professor McLuhan, who died in 1980, predicted that the electronic communications media of our age would retribalize our culture drastically altering our sense ratios in a way which could reverse the effects of the phonetic alphabet.

Our new languages are simultaneous, interrelated, visceral, intuitive, and participatory (so the audience makes the connections). The "logic" of these languages can be circular, free-associating, discontinuous (i.e. without verbal road signs such as "and", "but", "because"), non-linear and out of sequence.

For instance, the film artist's vocabulary today includes not only the editorial twisting of time, lenses and special effects warping space, and three dimensional sound, but also computer flight simulators and early forms of virtual reality that will some day give us interactions like those seen on Star Trek’s holodeck.

In the 1950s McLuhan’s associate, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter said:

"English is a mass medium. All languages are mass media.

The new mass media--film, radio, TV--are new languages, their grammars yet unknown. Each codifies reality differently."

Just as we learned oral languages as children, we've also learned the symbol systems of other media. Why are fast commercials, phone machines, computerized bankbooks and e-mail are so horrifying to most 90 yr old grannies? Because they never learned the languages!

McLuhan asks four questions to clarify the nature & impact of a medium-

1. What does enhance or amplify in the culture?

2. What does it obsolesce or push out of prominence?

3. What does retrieve from the past, from the realm of the previously obsolesced?

4. What doees the medium reverse flip into when it reaches the limits of its potential?"

Becoming conversant about mass media is an important mark of an educated person today, and much of our ongoing education requires learning new media. The first to understand the vocabulary of a new medium can be the first to profit from it. But yet newer media can reverse these advantages. And because the audience is constantly being reshaped ("we shape our tools, and our tools shape us") communicators must constantly make adjustments. Some examples:

l Martin Luther understood that the Gutenberg Bible had decentralized access to the "word of God". Translating it into vernacular German, he enabled laymen to read the Scriptures, undermining the authority of the priesthood. This was a major factor in the Protestant Reformation.

l The inventors of MTV understood that a speeded-up, non-linear, discontinuous, multi-sensory vocabulary had already been taught to a generation through commercials, who could easily decode a full-time channel in this language. (They also understood that the recording industry would provide the programming for free. Ironically, twenty years later, digital file sharing threatens to make all music content free to everyone via piracy.)

l The computer graphics vocabulary of recent motion pictures is reshaping the syntax of the next generation of movie-goers, much as television commercials reshaped the sensibilities of the first generation to grow up on TV, fifty years ago. Remember, McLuhan didn’t advocate these changes as a good thing – he simply encouraged us to note them..

Now, besides giving us new languages to learn, what else have these new media wrought on our culture? Let’s take a quick inventory of some characteristics and effectsof the electronic media. Exactly how has our world been transformed?

WE LIVE IN AN INSTANTANEOUS INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT
The electronic communications media of our time...television, radio, computers...have certain characteristics diametrically opposed to those of print:

l Communication is Instantly Everywhere [in print the deal was "we haven't heard from Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in Paris this year...we should write him a letter"]

l In a world of instantaneous communications, we live in a GLOBAL VILLAGE. [Seems obvious now, but it wasn’t when McLuhan published the Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962]

l Information overload. When information comes at us from many different sources, it's like an "implosion" a barrage of images and sounds. Sensory overload can often result.

Invididuals must become adept at using technology to help us sort and select information.

Communicators need increasingly distinctive imagery, humor, and unique environments to break through.

l When information moves a electronic speeds, it changes
Details become blurred and disappear.

Causes and effects are time-compressed, appearing simultaneous, condensing into patterns.

Pattern recognition becomes a valuable resource, so those who best use technology to crunch detailed data become leaders (e.g etailers like WalMart, or programmed traders in the investment community)

We must now pay attention to reaction, as well as action, knowing in advance the consequences of policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. [Instant Replays, corporate scandals] Contingency Planning and Crisis Management are thus key professional skills of the information age.

l When information moves a electronic speeds, it often becomes instantaneously obsolete. As information is acquired, it is replaced by still newer information.

Education is now a life-long responsibility because new technologies require updated skills and training. The quality control employee in a computer chip factory needs an elementary knowledge of calculus; doctors keeping up with worldwide development in their specialties on the Internet; Microsoft revises its operating system, and millions of workers are thrown into upgrade hell when a smaller software provider rushes to market with a buggy release.

l Technologies beget technologies. TV begat videotapes; telephones: answering machines; space satellites: image enhancement technology.

l Media also merge and mutate. The telephone and the radio combined technology and became cell phones, which are now about to change again due to digital technology. Computers moved from text to icons, to audio and full motion video and may now converge with telephones and cable television.

l The interaction among media is greater that the sum of the individual parts. "Successful" content snowballs and generates growing momentum. This tendency will grow as individual gain access to newer and more sophisticated media with which to replicate content.

l The vocabularies of the media themselves are in a constant state of change.
Anticipating and understanding changes in an existing medium can be as valuable as grasping a new medium. Computer processor speeds and storage capacities are doubling every year or so. What effects will this have? Will we see more personalized media? How soon until each consumer gets custom editorials, advertisements, and news?

l Electronic media are frequently characterized by mass inexpensive access. Therefore giving away information for free becomes a competitive necessity. Will inexpensive access democratise media? Camcorders are taking the control of the mass media out of the hands of the editors and gatekeepers, and into the hands of those who understand the needs of the medium, or have their own need for a public identity. Will new media can do further damage to older technology? Mechanical adding machines vanished overnight. Cable has reshaped the economics of the television medium. Video the economics of the film medium.

l Broadcast media such as TV are conducive to large, shared live events and remain the most essential ingredient for triggering large events involving other media.

l Broadcast media generate both instantly disposable content, and endlessly recyclable content. Shorter form communication is generally more repeatable than longer form. Humor, catch phrases, bursts of emotion, startling or distinctive imagery, tends to guarantee repetition.

l The media amplify certain stories that play into their "language" In addition to shorter form humor, sound bites, emotion, and surprising visuals, media-genic stories often involve scandal, celebrities, conflict, including criminally violent conflict as well as conflict between global village "tribes" such as nations or ethnic groups.

l Media events can be anticipated. It is useful to developing an intuitive understanding of the effects of the media environment, to become viscerally "media-wise". Why? Because when the next Rodney King videotape is played, you may anticipate its consequences.

l All media are interactive As message highways, some media seem to be one-way streets (e.g. most broadcast TV -- extending this metaphor, think of ratings as a sidewalk allowing some movement back in the other direction); others seem to be more participatory two-way streets (the telephone) or an intersection (conference phones or call-in radio). Has the power of one-way media peaked in 20th century? Only until the next Super Bowl, or the next world crisis. Earlier this century Alduous Huxley warned us "never before in human history have so many listeners been at the mercy of so few speakers" Or, for those buying time in the television upfront: never before have so many advertisers been at the mercy of so many networks offering so few viewers.

l Effects on News and Information TV codes the news differently from newspapers. The script for 80% of one nightly news program could fit in a single column of one page of the NY Times. (What would be missing would be the intonation, and the pictures).

Subjected to a global blizzard of information, the consumer of information – and all of us collectively as information consumers – need to develop the ability to scan, select, and circulate important information. Trivial celebrity reports and media-genic scandals dominated the popular media prior to September 11, 2001. As individuals, and as a country, we could have been better informed and better prepared.

Do our media distort social and political communication? Is too much emphasis placed on crude sensationalism, and not enough on substance? Do the media tend to get ahead of trends and feed on the "cutting edge", fostering social disruption?

Note that media have different vocabularies. TV itself codes the politicians differently from newspapers. The newspapers require the politician's policy statements; TV requires his self-assurance. Beyond the biases of the reporters’, which are the other biases of the medium itself? Does ease of access cause too much emphasis on politics, compared to, for instance, coverage of business and technological change? Do our media cover the globe, or just our neighborhood? Could they do more to tell us interesting stories about various cultures?

l Effects on Education Educators wary of the new media might consider McLuhan's observation that "We become robots when uncritically involved with our technologies."

The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing, but the character of language and the relations between author and public.
Radio, film, TV pushed written English towards the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom.
They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture.
If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won't be because there's anything inherently wrong with them.
It will be because we've failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage...
Few students ever acquire skill in analysis of newspapers.
Fewer have any ability to discuss a movie intelligently.
To be articulate and discriminating about ordinary affairs and information is the mark of an educated man.
It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment...It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively."
--Classroom Without Walls, Marshall McLuhan EXPLORATIONS #8 (1957); reprinted in McLUHAN HOT & COOL (Stearn, ed.)