marshall McLuhan Key Concepts "The medium is the message". Traditionally, we think that the message is what is important.

. And there can be many different messages that come out of the same technology for very different purposes (eg the electric light can be used for sport stadiums or operating theatres). In this thesis, Guns dont kill people; people kill people. On the other hand, McLuhan wants to argue that the medium contains its own message, which is INDEPENDENT OF THE CONTENT. The medium does the same thing, no matter in what context. For McLuhan, the message of any medium is always formal. Its about structure or scale, about what kinds of patterns it produces. We can ask two questions: o What does the technology do? E.g. lights shed light on things; they allow people to see better. Guns shoot things, no matter what theyre shooting at. Thats their purpose. o How does it change our actions or our relationship with the world? Lights extend the sense of vision. Guns extend our arms range (thats why theyre called arms!). The light bulb and the gun are physical technologies, but this also applies to communication technologies. The medium structures the way we interact with the world, irrespective of what its content is. The message that books convey, for example, is that stories must be told spatially. They make the understanding of stories into a rational enterprise (unlike speech, which is soundoriented and can go off in many directions). Although McLuhan doesnt put it this way, you could say that the medium is the message is his way of saying not what does it say? But what does it do and how does it change us? "Hot media/cool media" This is the most slippery of McLuhans ideas. It refers to the way in which specific media excite or dont excite the senses (McLuhan is very sense-oriented). It also refers to their level of interaction. A medium is hot if it is high-definition, i.e. it contains a lot of information. Because of this, theres not much for the audience to do they just watch or listen. It often excites only one sense, and it saturates it. Radio, for example, uses only sound, but uses it intensely. And it is low-participation because all you can do is listen to it. Film is hot, even though it includes sound, because it is mostly about vision, and because it is similarly not interactive. Print is hot because it engages only vision, and its linear it forces you to read in one direction. All of these are also hot because they capture you completely. A medium is cool if it is low-resolution and requires a lot of interaction/audience participation/filling in. A telephone is cool because even theres only one sense engaged, like the radio, the user has to fill in the missing information they interact with it. Cool media also dont capture you the same way hot media do you can talk on the phone, text, and do other things all at the same time. This may be one reason television is categorized by McLuhan as cool because TV can easily run in the background. It doesnt force you into one behavior (this is kind of debatable). "Typographic man" This is the idea that print and typography changed the way we communicate by moving from sound to vision. Typographic man refers to the way our ideas are structured differently in the age of print than they were before print when we read, we can go back over ideas we dont understand, etc.

But also, we start to take notice of the way ideas are organized ON THE PAGE. Modern technical writing would be impossible without this: we need headers, bullet points, etc so that we can tell whats important and whats not.

"The global village" Probably the easiest of his concepts. We used to live in villages and rely on oral knowledge. Ideas spread very quickly, like viruses. Peoples relationships were personal/based on local knowledge. With media, this is happening again, except on a global scale. The question of whether this is a true village in the original sense is complicated because now we have a medium that stands between every connection we make. Notes for The Galaxy Reconfigured McLuhan starts out by talking about the "sense ratio" - the way in which our inner senses and imagination are made up of a kind of synaesthetic experience. He compares this with Blake's idea of the "specter" and the "imagination": o The specter is the "reasoning power of man", the scientific part of us, which is separated from the self o The imagination is the internal, multiple sense world inside our minds. It is "immortal". When the specter triumphs over imagination, ideas become rigid and closed off, or confined to one particular sense. o In classical rhetoric, we try to classify and organize speech and ideas rigorously and rigidly. o In modern art & literature, McLuhan notes the practice of "pictorial realism", for example, in which artists and poets tried the render the world as accurately as possible. BUT all is not lost. McLuhan notes that writers throughout the ages have also tried to bring back in the kind of synaesthetic sense that Blake talked about. His examples are the Gothic and Joyce's works, which combine stream of consciousness with sense impressions. Now let's talk about media. He claims that our senses have been "outered" by technology (like the idea of the specter). "Outering" is similar in concept to the "extensions of man" -i.e. in other words our senses are "extended" by technology (think of webcams as extending our sight, for example) BUT again, he says, not all media forms split apart the specter and the imagination. Communication technologies can combine together multiple senses, so that we get the same kind of experience as we have in our minds -- fragmented, different faculties competing for our attention. McLuhan is slowly, carefully drawing us back to the idea of the global village, and the idea that medium and message are two different things. He makes a distinction between form and content: the content (the imagination) is collective and synaesthetic, while the "expression" is single and rigid. In other words, once you write something down, you're stuck with it. Now let's look at marketing and capital. McLuhan seems to be saying that this split is also happening in the market. You can't market the collective unconscious, but you can market the products - books, paintings etc. SO. What happens when modern mass media gets involved? On the one hand, it replicates the problem of texts because it concretizes the unconscious. it "isolates" our senses by focusing on one at a time - vision, or sound. ON THE OTHER HAND, media starts to undo this problem, because it produces expressions very fast, & they're changeable or multiple. We can start to express the collective unconscious in a tangible form. You can make a lot of money from this (as we see from 24hr news networks).

Now, think of blogs and blog journalism. What do they do? Notes for Baudrillard Baudrillard wants to talk about the social forces behind media. He takes to task two positions: McLuhan (which he more or less calls apolitical) and Enzenberger, who he says is applying Marxist theory in way too traditional ways. He says that Enzenbergers use of Marxist theory theories of production and labor are too narrow to discuss media. He summarizes Enzenbergers position that revolutionaries are afraid to use media because they view it as a tool of the ruling elites. They dream of taking over the media, but they dont know how to achieve that dream; they dont realize that the media is an enormously productive force. Enzenberger argues that theres no inherent bias in media that means it has to be used only by the ruling class. He wants to, as Baudrillard calls it, liberate the media. The problem, says Baudrillard, is that this just echoes the same Marxist doctrine over & over: theres a great force, its been taken over by the elites, and we have to take it back, His biggest issue is with the idea (from both McLuhan and Enzenberger) that the media is somehow inherently politically neutral. Instead, it is something that fabricates non-communication. Mass media exists as the monopoly of speech, and any attempt to take the speech back is doomed. This is because mass media is one-way; it is not an exchange. He sees one of the problems as the classical model of TRANSMITTER MEDIUM RECEIVER. As long as you have that, theres no conversdation. Even with letters to the editor, its still the editor who decides what gets printed. So its not a real conversation. Instead, he wants a model of real conversation, instantaneous.

And it looks like we might have it but does it achieve what Baudrillard wants? Are we all equal? Notes for Raymond Williams, The Technology and the Society. Technological determinism what is it? Is it reasonable to describe technology as a cause? If technology is a cause, what kind of power do we have, or are we helpless? If technology is an effect, what is it an effect of? (a) Versions of cause and effect. (1) The technology is accidental; its consequences are unintended and caused by the technology itself. This is called technological determinism, where technology causes what follows. (2) The technology is accidental, but its effects would have happened some other way, because its a symptom of some underlying social need. This is called symptomatic technology. Williams goal is to chart a middle course between these two possible interpretations, so that technology is not just something that happens to us. Why would he want this? Because it would mean we had choice, and power, rather than being the victims of technological change or social forces. (b) Social History of television. (1) Television did not just appear; it took on features from other technologies.

(2) Williams describes some of these: electricity, telegraphy, photography, film. (3) He also describes a convergence of social changes: new modes of production, communication and economics. (4) These discoveries happened in a community that made choices according to (sometimes unconscious) social and technological forces. Thus TV did not change society; rather it participated in its formation at a specific moment. (c) Uses of Technology. (1) On the surface, it seems like it could be said that new social needs demand new communications technologies: a causal relationship. (2) But its more complex because expressed needs are often only a subset of varying social forces. (3) In other words, what we think we need is sometimes tempered by the unconscious social needs that drive us. (4) The move from mass broadcasting (the Fascist model) to privatized networks comes not only at a time when social and political ideologies are competing, but also at a time when a much more abstract movement is happening: a change in emphasis from the community to the individual, what Williams calls mobile society. (5) This in turn can only happen because of other social, economic and technological forces, e.g. the spreading of wealth and the creation of a middle class creates more leisure time, which leads to more individual pursuits.