The medium is the message

For some useful and brief background on the thought of Marchall McLuhan and his concept, “the medium is the message,” browse this wikipedia entry.

As an example of McLuhan’s assertion that the content of every medium is the medium itself–ie, the real message lies in how any message is conveyed (its mediation) not what the content or message is–we could take this Wikipedia entry. MM would argue that the real effect on those who read this entry comes through the way the ideas (in this case, some background, initial description of ideas, further links and resources) are conveyed and not the ideas by themselves. There is no idea apart from its medium for MM. And so the nature of a wiki–its ways of conveying content, of linking, of the kinds of writing and reading experiences it emphasizes and enforces, is the message.

He also distinguishes two types of experiences we can have with a communication medium: hot (or high definition) such as film–where our attention needs to be focused, absorbed; and cool (or low definition) where the active participation of the viewer/participant is more crucial to the experience, such as with a book (turning the page, re-reading, etc).

It is with this understanding of media that I will emphasize that books are a medium–and that the notion of books vs new media is inaccurate since books are another kind of media. I will also emphasize, borrowing the term from Katherine Hayles (the author of Writing Machines) that as critical readers, we need to practice ‘media specific analysis’ whenever dealing with a medium–which is always.

When would we not be dealing with a medium, with ideas (whatever form or shape) that reach us through some form of mediation?

The phrase ‘remediation’ comes from the authors Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin who build upon McLuhan to argue, further, that every new medium builds upon, repurposes and remediates an earlier and existing medium. Thus the medium is the message also implies that there is no new media apart from ‘old’ media. Bolter and Grusin take this even further (which is to say, take our new media all the way back to MM’s older view) in suggesting that the content of every new medium is the act of remediation itself: how the new medium relates to and reuses the old.

We can think of this in terms of film, and will be doing so as part of our third focal point: the way film remediates the Frankenstein story.

Thesis/Remediation

Conference reminder: I will be expecting each of you to meet with me for an individual conference (about your writing, your to-do list, the third project, questions from the reading) at some point before Friday April 3. You can stop by during my office hours or schedule a time to meet with me.

For the third writing project, ‘Remediated Wreading,’ we will continue to focus on developing and maintaing an effective and provocative thesis in our essays. With that in mind, you can go back to your second project and think now about how you might remediate the thesis–revise it, make it stronger, state it more clearly. One way to play with this: go to thesis builder and input the relevant information for your second essay; see what kind of thesis and essay structure it comes up with. It is a template, not the only way to construct a thesis–but for the purposes of learning, might be useful in highlighting some key components that might be missing from your thesis.

Another way to learn, to remediate, is to look at other, relevant models. Don’t forget to browse some of the essays from your peers (by way of the blogs). 

A third remediation we will be working on in the third project: how a new medium (film) takes up and ‘remediates’ an older medium (writing, print novel). The focus of the third project is to explain the ‘thesis’ (a key argument or idea or interest) that you see in the film you have chosen (its thesis about Frankenstein) and how the film, as a film (and not a book) shows/develops/elaborates that thesis.

the medium is the message

After my 9.30 class Friday morning, I stopped in the library to browse some books. I went there looking for a book titled Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace and while in that section of the stacks (roughly, media and language studies, some history of writing mixed in), I cruised a few other titles–something I enjoy doing in libraries, as I enjoy doing in Google books or other online databases of books; both take up time and can be refreshingly distracting. One book I brought back with me was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, a famous book from the 1960s by a so-called media guru. I got it to browse a few items that I felt would be worth bringing into our discussion. McLuhan defines media in that book as “extensions of man.” Contrary to someone like Birkerts, who neglects the medium of the book and tends to view media only as the new, the electronic, McLuhan understands that a medium is anything that extends the capability of a human who uses it. Thus any and all forms of communication tools are media, starting with language itself: writing, pencil, book, printing press, variety of computer mediated forms of writing and language. And in this book he extends this notion of extension: literally any tool that can be considered an extension: clothing, wheels, houses.

In the same book, McLuhan repeats a saying he made famous (perhaps you have heard of it): the medium is the message. He means in large part that the significance of any  medium  is the mediation it provides; he also means that a new medium contains aspects and traces of the old medium it supposedly replaces. A bit later in the course we will get back to this idea that has come to be called “remediation.”

Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that  a medium such as writing (print or electronic) is significant and meaningful in part (McLuhan a bit more boldly might say entirely) for the way it pulls back the curtain on the communication (or extension) it provides. This foregrounding of the medium is on my mind in the readings this week. We have Birkerts who is focused so intently and intensively on the privacy of print and writing, on the qualities of a book to be a medium of transport and self-extension–yet thinking very little about the medium (machine) of the book or even the writing that goes into it. At the other end, with Hayles and the reading we start for Friday (Writing Machines), we find an author similarly transported by literature and the private life of reading, yet who insists upon the material encounter with the medium of writing, of print, and of electronic text. And in the middle, Frankenstein. A story, it seems to me, about the mediated nature of creativity, authorial and biological; about being consigned, as humans, to the workshop of filthy creation.

McLuhan highlights for me the ways that Birkerts is neglecting to define and consider and reflect upon and understand the mediated nature of new media (instead of generalizing, too quickly brushing them off). And though he does do a better job being more deliberate and reflective regarding the media of print (all the reading and writing he discusses), there is still this problem. He gets, I think, the medium of print wrong. Consider this paragraph from McLuhan that evokes Birkerts’ senses of passivity vs. activity, except it locates the passive not with television but with the technology of literacy.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. [Understanding Media, 4]

I see a good bit of Birkerts in this image of detachment. Ironically, McLuhan gives us to imagine this scenario at home: parent yelling at child to put down that book, stop being so lazy, and get on the internet and do something.

What do you think?

Dear you, whoever you are

I look forward to meeting you in class. By the time you are looking at this, this right now, it is already days after I am writing this, this right now, and most likely I have met you, in the first class. So let me say, rather, I look forward to getting to know you.

[Whitman was really on to something, the way we do travel through our writing medium, like a voice from beyond, like a ferry that crosses over and back: check out his great poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" to see what I mean. It has been on my mind recently as I have worked on the course and began setting up this digital ferry. More on that later]

This site, Comp\Post, is part blog and part course web. I will use Blackboard, as you know, though mainly to collect and maintain, in virtual presence, your finished writing projects. For day to day updates and thoughts, including more from my own glogging (what’s that?), and hopefully lots of input from your own, this will be the place to go. I also have plans for you to help me build a writing resource wiki for this course and for everyone in English 101.

The point of all this? Well, as you begin to fathom from the syllabus, and perhaps from some of what I said thus far in class, this is a course that uses these various technologies as tools and media of writing, which they are (and you already know them, even if you haven’t considered them writing media). That may be unavoidable. But since we are focusing more deliberately in this course on writing (and learning to write more deliberately), and since the topic of the literature we are reading has something to do with writing and technology, with (borrowing from Katherine Hayles) writing machines, we want to do more than just not avoid the implications of writing and mediation. We want to think more specifically and robustly and imaginatively about the medium (and media) of our writing.

So, there it is. This site and other experiments with writing and remediation (a term to be explained), including your own experiments, will serve a purpose. I hope that purpose leads you, someday, you whoever you are, back here or perhaps back to your blog or to your final publication from this course and see that you have realized in your writing more than you supposed.