Mcluhan's Message Clarified

One of my pet peeves for the past year has been how often people misuse Marshall Mcluhan's phrase, "the medium is the message"; whether it's yet another essay that mangles his ideas, or people on mailing lists telling me that "the automobile is not a medium", someone is always making claims in reference to Mcluhan that are way out of line with what he actually wrote. If I had a penny for every time I read an essay that concluded with an 'improvement' on Mcluhan's "the medium is the message", I'd have a year's worth of micropayments.

Being ignorant of Mcluhan's actual writing is certainly not a recent development. Mcluhan himself had a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977. Allen's character is annoyed by an obnoxious academic who is next in line at a theatre, going on about Mcluhan's ideas on media. Allen's character tells the professor he's way off, but he retorts, "I teaches a course at Colombia called 'Media and Society'", so he's obviously in the know. Magically, Mcluhan appears and tells the man he's got it all wrong. Allen muses: "wouldn't it be great if life were always like this?" Indeed it would, and thus my naive belief that writing this article will change the popular understanding of Mcluhan's assertions.

I always thought that frequent misinterpretation was a result of Mcluhan's confusing style, but as I read more of his stuff, it became apparent that while it was at times a bit thick, there were some things that one just plain has to try to misinterpret, assuming that one is paying attention in the first place. This leads me to believe that a good deal of the people that casually criticize or discuss the idea that "the medium is the message", do so without having read (or at least understood) anything about it.

Whilst perusing a back issue of Wired last week, I came upon Umberto Eco (someone who should know better) delivering a completely off-base criticism of "the medium is the message." Eco's misrepresentation is pretty indicative of how Mcluhan is treated day to day by a lot of folks, but not necessarily at all in line with Mcluhan's actual thinking.

"...he came up with the global village prophecy, which has turned out to be at least partly true, the "end of the book" prophecy, which has turned out to be totally false, and a great slogan - 'The medium is the message' - which works a lot better for television than it does for the Internet.

OK, maybe at the beginning you play around, you use your search engine to look for "shit" and then for "Aquinas" and then for "shit AND Aquinas," and in that case the medium certainly is the message. But when you start to use the Net seriously, it does not reduce everything to the fact of its own existence, as television tends to. There is an objective difference between downloading the works of Chaucer and goggling at the Playmate of the Month."

Eco's little spiel might be dead on if you take the popular interpretation of "the medium is the message", but if one were to read the following paragraphs from the first chapter of Understanding Media, it would become apparent that this commonly held view is simply innacurate.

"...the 'content' of any medium is always just another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, 'What is the content of your speech?,' it is necessary to say, 'It is an actual process of thought, which is itself nonverbal.'

...the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work or leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium."

McLuhan essentially defines "the medium" as, simply enough, anything that mediates. Since "things that mediate" include everything that figures as a part of human interaction, media are not limited to communication, and there are very few media that do not form a part of another medium, or include other media.

That each medium has an inherent topology - a set of limitations and things that it makes possible - is essential to understanding how the medium is the message.

Every message is necessarily mediated by a number of things, not just one arbitrarily selected 'medium'. In that sense, it might been more clear had Mcluhan said "the media are the message", but that clouds the point he was getting at: each medium determines society and consciousness, some more than others. All this, like most short articles that mention Mcluhan, is an utter simplification of what he actually wrote. For the rest, just pick up a paperback copy of Mcluhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in paperback. They're only few bucks used.