Lecture Series #3
Understanding McLuhan
The Medium is the Message
- A talk by Ranveer Nandra
Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The medium is the message’:
- The means through which the image is communicated.
- How these types of tools/technologies are seen as filters for things we want to communicate.
- Counterblast 1967, we now have an implosion of the age of instant humans. The electric age is organic.
digifrenia- our media and technology encode us to be in more than one place at one time.
‘Being Alone Together’
Important insights: data, knowledge, information and wisdom.
With implications for.... Artists, designers, film makers, typographers etc.
McLuhan:
1) An appreciation of the power of visual culture.
2) Understanding of technological changes.
3) How and why society is changed by ideas and tools.
4) How and why these changes alter human behaviour and mental attitudes.
5) How to both predict and create the future by understanding the present.
A summary of key thinkers and texts:
Harold Innis - the bias of communication - time and space biases monopolising of knowledge.
Marshall McLuhan - understanding media - the global village, medium as a message and media as an extension of senses.
Neil Postman - technopoly - media ecology.
Douglas Rushkoff - program or be programmed - programming culture.
1) The Bias of the Medium:
Harold Innis (1894-1952) - Historian, political economist and communication theorist.
McLuhans jumping off point.
“Neutrality is never as neutral as it appears” - Slavoj Žižek
“Every typeface is an expression of something even neutrality has to be expressed.” - Jon Pinhorn, type designer
everything is predisposed to creating some type of behaviour.
everything that has been designed carries baggage from that designer.
aka. design legacy.
e.g. computer software limits you to what can be created by that specific computer.
Neutrality does not exist.
Technologies alter the structure of interest we think about.
Technologies alter the character of our symbols, the things we think through and with.
Technologies alter the nature of community, an arena which thoughts are founded.
Harold Innis -
Some media are biased towards time and space.
e.g.
Time- The pyramids, built to last through the ages.
Space - Physical conquest, Apple iPhone, transitory and vulnerable to changing.
Medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan.
Messages are not static objects, they are hundreds of prisms firing off each other.
Media is the extension of the sense
Media is made of consciousness extra sematic memory.
Media is the crystallisation of human thought.
Media is a means of social integration.
Typography is not only a technology, but is in itself a neutral resource or staple.
Like cotton, or timer, or radio and like any staple it shapes not only the private sense.
All forms of media are extensions of the human body; sense, mind, consciousness.
Language is an extension of our thoughts.
the hammer is an extension of our arms.
the wheel is an extension of our legs and feet.
Scriptura Continua.
Diacritical marks aka. punctuation marks.
All had to be invented.
The invention of spacing - invented by irish monks.
withoutspacingwewouldbestrugglingtoreadandmakesenseofwrittenstuff.
with spacing we are able to read and make sense of written stuff.
“Don’t be such a tool!”
“We shape our tools, and then they shape us”
Tool ----> Medium ----> Environment
Behaviours are changed through using technology.
The Medium is the Mess age.
not 1 thing, it is organic. not fixed objects they are fluid. interwoven. interlinked.
“Environment is a process, not a container”
Experience of being...
a user of ... invloved with... dwelling in... acted on... used by...
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” Maslow
Involvment: People.
Dwelling in an electronic environment.
“People don’t actually ready news papers they step into them every morning, like a hot bath.”
Used by: becoming part of someone else’s environment.
Programming the environment:
As a graphic designer.
“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive, it is ecological”
“No one cares about how things work, as long as they work”
“We must learn how to make the software or else we become the software.” - Rushkoff
“Stop calling yourself a user, you are being used”
Like a fish in a digital era...
looking for jobs robust enough to survive the digital age.
Technological determination - technological change determines everything and human will has no say.
Art and design can be thought of as programming.
Designers =
thinkers,
builders,
improvers,
producers,
Generating and making and improving on and executing ideas making things better to a high standard.
Designers are not just here for prettification and making things look nice.
Design or be designed