Hi Reddit,
I’m currently studying for my first media & communications final and I’m having trouble with Marshall McLuhan’s theory about “the medium is the message”. I understand that it’s more about the choice of medium rather than what the message is saying, but in what way? I’ve tried googling and watching videos, but I still don’t quite understand it.
Can anyone help me?
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He’s saying that all media, regardless of its content, has another meaning. If we take TV and the internet as examples, traditionally TV has a schedule and we passively watch this schedule. With the internet, we control the schedule because we can choose what to consume when we want to. All pretty obvious, but if you are running an authoritarian government (for instance) you may want to use TV to brainwash your population, which is possible because of the way it is made and consumed, whereas the internet may undermine your authority because people can search for dissenting opinions.
Think about all the different types of media and the implicit meaning they have – The broadsheet newspaper with a title printed in some classical-looking typeface might give an impression of serious, unbiased journalism. Does that impression come from the actual content or does it come from our shared cultural idea of what ‘a serious newspaper’ is?
The cultural expectations we bring with us when we consume media, and the reality of how each medium actually gets produced, is a message in itself.
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