“[The] Valley Morning Star in Harlingen, TX, dismantled a months-old pay wall after its traffic collapsed by some 40%.”
Proving yet again that Marshall McLuhan was an idiot.
The medium is not the message.
The message is the message.
“[The] Valley Morning Star in Harlingen, TX, dismantled a months-old pay wall after its traffic collapsed by some 40%.”
Proving yet again that Marshall McLuhan was an idiot.
The medium is not the message.
The message is the message.
The message is the message.
Well put.
Marshall Mcluhan studied advertising. It probably
warped his brain. Anyway, his early work on
advertising is modest and not particularly
contentious. His later, wilder work, was actually
written – under the influence of a brain tumour!
Magazines on dogs, magazines on gardening, etc.,
are obviously popular and are often marvels of the
designer’s art.
I once had the occasion to listen to an old interview with McLuhan on the radio. I have never heard someone speak so much while saying absolutely nothing.
I just like to recall those Canadian History vignettes they used to run and in particular the one dramatising McLuhan’s “profound” observation. The best part is the bright young faces as they realize they are witnessing something historic in their young lives. Reminds me of the sychophantic dolts in my Poli Sci class as they were held in rapt awe of the tenured, communist at the front of the class pontificate on the state of the working class when he never held an honest job in his life!
I knew Mr.McLuhan from my school days at U of T. I can assure you that he was not an idiot;in fact, he was far from that.
Too many people have misinterpreted the ideas of a man who never once forced his opinions down anyone’s throat.
You may not agree with his ideas, but that gives you no license to claim he was an idiot for having them.
Many people who denigrate McLuhan are probably mistaking him for Noam Chomsky who truly is an idiot.
Paging KevinB.
“…..someone speak so much while saying absolutely nothing”.
Sounds like an interview with the American Prime Minister in waiting!
(or Obama)
I got a backrub from my fortune teller, causing me to remark, “the medium is the massage.”
I always found that McLuhan quote vapid at best. I tried to read some of his books – boring as all get-out.
The medium DRIVES the message.
Print medium is staid, somewhat slow in delivery, and has the luxury of space to deliver content. Glossy mags will tilt towards pictures, newsprint will tilt towards text.
Electronic medium is new, but seems to be terse, condensed, and limited in depth, although dissemination of information can be quite rapid. However, the benefit of speed often trumps accuracy and content.
I too remember those vignettes and agree with you that “The best part is the bright young faces as they realize they are witnessing something historic in their young lives.”
It reminded me of my college days and my meeting W.O. Mitchell. The next time I saw my parents I boasted that I met the famous author W. O. Mitchell. Dad asked me, “Oh how’s he doing” “I haven’t seen him since I finished grade 10” “He was my teacher that year”. Took all the fun out of it.
Content is king. Always has been. I pay to get hugh hewitts podcast and his blog as I do Dennis miller and the weekly standard and national review. Their content is all unique and while opinionated largely well-researched in an open way rather than the agenda driven way research is done and reported by the MSM.
That is why their subscription model fails.
Bah… the McLuhan comment was about what the choice of medium says about the people who use it to disseminate information and perhaps the people who choose to acquire information.
When it comes to the MSM and especially the print media in the year 2010 … it is most apropos.
WOW, Kate: another headline hit!! I now forgive you your I Miss W which is, erm (that’s EBD’s um) idiotic.
“The message is the message.” With apologies to McDonald’s, I’m Lovin It.
I always thought McLuhan was an idiot [note: a hugely intelligent person can be an idiot] albeit, a very fashionable one. He was a philosophical entrepreneur simply creating his own language and making up stuff.
LOL, Black Mamba, I scrolled thru and saw KevinB, and thought ‘uh oh!’ not realizing it was in the text of your post.
Anyone can easily understand why the ordinary person has contempt for the MSM. A perfect example is the “investigative reporting” feeding frenzy by a major Toronto daily going on at present since it suits their political biases. Meanwhile huge scams and corrupt dealings by those in whose politics it finds comfort have no reason to worry about exposure.
“Proving yet again that Marshall McLuhan was an idiot”.
I agree. Nobody knew what McLuhan was talking about because McLuhan didn’t know what McLuhan was talking about (Iggy’s hominid ancestor on the evolutionary continuum?)
I preferred quoting Alvin Toffler instead, but because he’s a Yank I don’t think my Profs liked it. But Toffler was quite accurate 30 years ago when he predicted that the coming information revolution could be best illustrated with a “Spy” metaphor. The “message” is critical, and so is keeping it free from government control.
Chris in the Bridge @ 5:05 PM: “I have never heard someone speak so much while saying absolutely nothing.”
Obviously that was before Iggy and The One.
I grew up in the 50’s mainly….
Newspaper reported news and Life magazine provided the good pictures.
The TV with You Are There, 20th Century and of course Cronkeit…..
Then all long time ago and far far away it was our responsiobility to ensure Cronkeit met no harm from Victor Charles’ tantrums….
It was safe and tedious…..rangling these dweebs in bars, hotels and the occasional foray to make authentic appearing photo-ops.
Later when we saw the product….we regreted the lost opportunity to alter history…it would have been oh so easy…..but then realistically would it have been a bad game of whack-a-mole?
I guess it’s like the Brit, who later realized he had had Adolf in his sights in WW1 but…..
Or the American Diplomat in Switzerland who didn’t trouble have a meeting with an obscure Russian expatriot….Vladimir Ulyanov….
Only 40%? If 60% of your customers are paying for content isn’t that better than giving it away for free? Something doesn’t sound right or am I not reading this right?
Eric, you said “However, the benefit of speed often trumps accuracy and content.”
I think it is the accessibility that trumps all. I’m not forced to get my news from 2 local TV stations and a local paper anymore. Now I can get my information from an artist in saskatchewan, an engineer in quebec, a lawyer in calgary, and a coworker in saudi arabia.
One prediction of the computer age was that it would lead to a life of leisure. Looks like the only group that will work out for is the media, whom the average citizen can bypass now.
mecheng – excellent point that I missed
Uh … Sorry, but I read McLuhan’s essay quite a few years after it became famous, and I thought it one of the best and clearest I’d ever read from a man involved in such an obtuse subject. I think that, for the time, it was an excellent read. To each his own, I guess.
It is true that I heard the McLuhan interview long before I had ever heard the name Michael Ignatieff. Unfortunately, Iggy is not alone when it comes to politicians with empty words.
I did not intend to to convey the impression that I thought McLuhan an idiot. I can’t say that from that one interview without reading (or hearing) more of his work. I always thought that his most famous quote “The Medium is the Message” to be far too nebulous and really without any real meaning (for me at least)
It just drove me nuts the way the Canadian History vignettes dramatized this moment as if it were one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. I prefer to remember real actions that made real differences in people’s lives.
Commence flaming!
The left will ( eventualy ) find a way to control information on the internet the way they control it in the main stream media,
Until then they are suffering casuallties.
But I doubt they will just give up and dissapear.
Obama, the United Nations and few others insane people on the left who are obsessed with power are about to change the way the internet works.
It should happen in a few years and of course it will be right wing blogs who will suffer the most.
Sorry to rain on your parade but the left is not done with us.
Expect some very selective censorship in the coming years,
Just read this exceprt from Reason.com
http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/15/the-paranoid-center/2
…Earlier this year[2009], the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the threat of “rightwing extremism.” Depending on whose interpretation you prefer, the paper either defined extremism far too broadly or failed to define it at all. “Rightwing extremism in the United States,” the department said, “can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
Got that?
Opposing abortion or immigration will put you on a list of right wing extremists groups…then they will close your blog…
Give it a few years.
It is coming.
Liberals do not admire tyrants just to annoy us, they have a little bit of tyrants » genes» in them ( if this can be explain by genes )
You may be right Chris, all I am saying is I was impressed with not just the message, but the writing abilities of the man, also. He also had some spiritual values one wouldn’t expect in a man such as he was, if I’m not mistaken. Of course, with some, this will just harden their resolve against the man’s reputation.
Friend in USA – In the last days, faith in religion will be decayed, morals will be loosened into chaos, there will be tumults and seditions, and great wars, and wise men will wish themselves dead. This is somewhere in the Bible I believe, but being Catholic, I’m not sure where.
Friend of USA: That doesn’t mean we should make it easy for them. Make them WORK to censor us. Make them play whack-a-mole. Use every device, tactic and stratagem at hand to confound and defy them. Make them drop their facade so that people will see them as no better than the Norks or the Chicoms. Always be one or two steps ahead of them, and game things out. If war (ideological or otherwise) is what they will wage on us, war is what they should get in return.
“I have never heard someone speak so much while saying absolutely nothing.”
that would define most philosophers, acedemics, and lefty intellects
Erik Larsen @ April 12, 2010 6:30 PM
I agree with most of what you said, Erik. However, this is where we differ when you say..
[Quote]
Electronic medium is new, but seems to be terse, condensed, and limited in depth,
[/Quote]
Limited in depth? That may SEEM to be so on the fist Google prod, but I suggest the depth is limitless when one starts digging.
Some topics offer so much depth, that one may not live long enough to review it all.
There are endless ways to search beyond Google. Specialized areas through universities..
Black Mamba:
Sorry, I’m working two jobs right now, so I don’t have to time to correct people’s misconceptions. I’m used to the usual gang of idiots dissing Macluhan; they wouldn’t know, or understand, a truly original idea if it gobsmacked them in the face.
But, Kate: I’m truly and sincerely disappointed that you would write that. Your blog, and the fractious little society it engenders, is proof positive of Macluhan’s point. Do you sincerely think that the “content” of any email, blog post, or tweet, no matter how well written or by whom or what it’s about, will have greater impact on society than the existence of the Internet itself? The Internet has reshaped industries, methods of interaction, politics, and education, just to name a few. I’d like to see any one of you try to refute this one simple statement with argument and evidence instead of just slagging the man. Many of you sound like lefties to me.
Aye, Kevin, it’s The Pathology of the Blogosphere™.
Re: “Macluhan’s point”
I’m mildly disappointed that you missed mine. 😉
Rule #1, Don’t take yourself too seriously
Would it matter to any of those pissing on McLuhan that in his personal life, which naturally carries over into the professional, that he was a seriously religious Roman Catholic and conservative?
KevinB is right, you’re all sounding like lefties.
Yeah McLuhan had it pretty much ass backwards. The message is the message and people are sick of paying for messaging that lies to them or distorts reason or reality or constantly tells them how they must think or feel or vote.
THat type of messaging can’t buy a readership on the net.
When this reality sinks in, watch for the Dinomedia to run to its patron, big brother, to shut down it’s competition.
Friend of USA, right on. larben, LOL. Monique, I agree.
Bill:
Thanks for that thought, which must have taken all of three seconds to formulate.
What Macluhan meant was the WAY any new medium changes society is far more profound than the content of any individual communication. The way TV has changed the world is far greater than the impact of any single episode of The Flintstones or even 60 Minutes. Look at the Nixon-Kennedy debates from the 1960’s; the people who listened on radio thought Nixon cleaned Kennedy’s clock. The people who watched on TV saw Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, and immediately decided he was a loser. SAME CONTENT, SAME WORDS, DIFFERENT MEDIUM, DIFFERENT IMPACT. Every dispassionate military person knows the US won the 1968 “Tet Offensive” battle; everybody who watched the body bags on TV thought they lost. If there had been no TV, doubtless the US wins in Vietnam, and the history of the world changes.
And Doug – you’re quite correct about Macluhan’s personal beliefs, but he was up front about not letting them get in the way of his work. He wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here, because I don’t have my library handy) “Personally, I deplore the effects that TV is having on society, but to ignore them or say “I don’t approve” is to be like Canute trying to hold back the waves. It’s more important to understand the effects and be aware of them than it is to take a stance of disapproval”.
“What Macluhan meant was the WAY any new medium changes society is far more profound than the content of any individual communication. The way TV has changed the world is far greater than the impact of any single episode of The Flintstones or even 60 Minutes”
Where I come from “blatantly obvious” and “profound insight” are not synonyms.
Where I come from “blatantly obvious” and “profound insight” are not synonyms.
Of course, Macluhan wrote Understanding Media nearly 50 years ago, so what’s blatantly obvious today was not nearly so apparent at the time. If you read, for example, Newton Minow’s famous essay where he described TV as a “vast wasteland”, which was more or less contemperaneous with Macluhan’s work, you’ll see that Minow focussed exclusively on the CONTENT of TV programming. The elites all moaned that if only TV showed more “highbrow” culture, the world would be a better place than one where Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and I Love Lucy ruled the airwaves. In fact, you can hear the same type of crap from CBC-lovers today. They all focus on CONTENT, whereas Macluhan was the first to focus on EFFECTS.
One hundred years on, we all accept quantum mechanics and relativity in physics, but they were considered radical at the time, and certainly not “blatantly obvious”. And 600 years ago, it was blatantly obvious that the sun moved around the Earth.
I’m sorry if I missed your point, Kate, but I’m kinda tired. Perhaps you could humour me, and explain it in more detail.
Would it be news if 20,000 cars were torched in Canada last year?
Because there were 40,000 torched in France with twice our population and somehow it isn’t news.
“Thanks for that thought, which must have taken all of three seconds to formulate. ”
That’s all the time needed to dispute Macluhan’s insular subjective reasoning.
McLuhan aside, what’s a regional paper in Texas doing erecting a paywall outside its web content? Somebody seems to have been given some very poor – but probably very expensive – advice.
Control of the medium was the message, and the progressive thugs learned it well.
That’s all the time needed to dispute Macluhan’s insular subjective reasoning.
Except you didn’t “dispute” it; you just asserted negation. See Monty Python for more details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM
Hmm.a few thoughts…
My take from the random sampling here is that many of you have either not read the man’s works, or have missed the point he was trying to make entirely.
I agree with Kevin B.What seems obvious now, was not 50 years ago when McLuhan was formulating his ideas.
Certainly, no one was thinking about (or indeed talking about) these ideas the way he was at that time.
As food for thought, I will quote him(from my recorded and annotated notes of a lecture given at 10:30 a.m., May 2, 1979)in which he talked about his ‘legacy’ and the ‘evolution of ideas’.
” Some say what I have deemed as ‘necessary information’ to be but anecdotal and entirely within the realm of the obvious.I ask you this, if that is what you think, if that is what you feel… is this now not the point? Do you feel so inclined because it is a blindingly obvious truth because you have known no other way?
How could it be explained any other way? A mere decade ago, it appeared to many people that these ideas could be shaping opinion of our interconnectedness.
Today, you here take what I say to be a self evident truth.Time and tide wait for no man, and certainly not the means by which we explain these self evident truths.You are the product of these changes. You provide the content simply by being engaged in the process of which you now take for granted…the way it should be, the natural order of the 24 hour a day, 7 day a week electronic universe.
You don’t see, you live it”
This was 30 plus years ago folks, the only thing that has changed is how much more involved we are in this 24/7 electronic world.
We are no longer products of this age, or being shaped by these forces.We ARE the media.We ARE the content providers.Think of any social media and you think communication content, the entire food chain from beginning to end.
McLuhan understood near the end that the products( namely us) of this media revolution, and those who came after, would never see what what had taken place as being revolutionary..because it would be all that they had ever known.
One would think that the events since that day have proved him to be entirely right, if not slightly understated!
“What Macluhan meant was the WAY any new medium changes society is far more profound than the content of any individual communication. The way TV has changed the world is far greater than the impact of any single episode of The Flintstones or even 60 Minutes”
So, Macluhan’s message was a self-described exercise in futility? Truly the act of an idiot.
ol hoss, I can’t decide whether you’re willfully ignorant, or just not very bright.
Macluhan never said content didn’t matter. He never said content was valueless or futile. This is a straw man that you and others have repeatedly set up, by either attributing to him words he never said, or misinterpreting his ideas in a colossal display of ignorance.
Macluhan pioneered two major ideas: one, that the same CONTENT offered in a different MEDIUM would have a different EFFECT, and two, that the CONTENT of any new medium was less important than the EFFECTS of the new medium on society. As I’ve said here repeatedly, the “message” of the automobile is NOT who’s riding in any given vehicle. It’s suburbs, smog, OPEC, interstates, driving to Disneyworld – things that were unthinkable just over 100 years ago.
I already mentioned the Nixon-Kennedy debate, hoss, but I’ll go over it again in short sentences that you might understand. The debate was broadcast on radio and TV AT THE SAME TIME, hoss. So the words were EXACTLY THE SAME. Therefore, according to you and the gang of fools, the EFFECT in each medium should have been EXACTLY THE SAME. But, as numerous pollsters and others found out, the EFFECTS were NOT the same. Radio listeners thought Nixon won; TV watchers liked Kennedy. Now, before you respond, I would like to you to explain to yourself how, if as you contend, only the CONTENT matters and the medium is irrelevant, this result is possible. I’ll wait.
Here’s another example I like to use: I can describe here the scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz’s men slice a live water buffalo in half, and no one will bat an eye. If I had a few still shots of the scene, and I showed them to you, you might have a bit more of a reaction. But if I showed a clip from the movie of the sudden blow, the animal falling apart, with its guts spilling out, most people who don’t work in abattoirs will have some noticeable reaction.
Once again, same subject, same CONTENT. But different MEDIA, different responses, and different EFFECTS.
Finally, Macluhan pointed out that most new media push the medium they replace into obsolesence, but that those obsolete media are later retrieved as art forms. I ask you to consider our gracious hostess’s championship dogs. There were no dog shows in the 1600’s; only the very rich could afford a dog as a pet. For most people, dogs were working animals, either herding sheep or cattle, or keeping rats and voles at bay, etc. But we don’t need as many dogs for those jobs now, and so we have dog shows instead. We don’t need horses to haul wagons or ploughs, so instead we have dressage and thoroughbred racing. If the newspaper people were not so blinkeredly focused on content, they might realize that making their newspapers more of an “art form” would give them more life. I don’t expect that to happen any more than I expect you to understand this post.
And that’s it – I’m out of this thread.
Ah, I think I get you now. the effects of Macluhan’s message was different according to the medium in which he exposed himself. In other words, you aren’t really sure what he said, since it might be the medium’s effect on you.