9/10/18

“The medium is the message.”

This term, originally coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, is stating that the means by which a message is conveyed is embedded into the message itself. In his book The Shallows, author Nicholas Carr refers to McLuhan’s Understanding Media, where McLuhan writes that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one (…) nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them” (Carr P.89). Although older forms of media may stick around after new ones have taken popularity, it is the new modes of media that eventually replace the old. “When the Net absorbs a medium, it recreates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed” (Carr P.90). These changes in the way we are presented the information in turn changes the way that we absorb the information.

It is not the message itself that grabs your attention, but the medium through which it is understood. Our discussion shifted to talking about literature as a medium, and how those who are illiterate are superior to those who are confined to understanding things by reading. Although I understand the logic here, I do not agree with this statement, since there is only so much you can learn from word of mouth or other modes of communicating. One example given in class was the story of Troy; before literature, every time this story was told, it was told differently. However, once written on paper, the story becomes the same over and over again. In this sense, you gain a lot through literacy, but you lose a lot at the same time.

9/12/18

We continued the discussion on the idea that “the medium is the message.” An example of this is the Smithsonian Museum; This is a means of communicating history. Not only that, but it is a means of controlling or owning history as well. In this sense, the information and the stories belong to the experts and scholars, not to the common people. We moved into a discussion of idealism vs realism. I strongly agree with the notion that idealists tend to be those who have a strong religious belief as they believe that an ideal world exists outside or separate from the one we are currently in. To an idealist, there is an ideal for everything, and it is not us. This relates to religion in the sense that the ‘ideal’ thing is God or heaven. Personally, I agree with this idea because I consider myself an idealist due to my faith. On the other hand, realists believe that there is no external existence that is better than the one we live in. It is what it is, and that is the reality that we must accept. While this is an entirely different worldview with its own benefits and costs, it could be particularly problematic, because realists have no external authority to validate what is good or what is better than what they have. However, the idealists problem is that they have no way of knowing if the ideal world exists or not. Due to the fact that these world views contrast so greatly, you cannot be both a realist and an idealist.