Is the Medium the Message?
4.4.07 | My training is in psychology and biology and, as formulated, the question stirs my disciplinary conscience. As we are biological creatures, equipped with a gradually evolved nervous system, our fundamental human nature changes very slowly. We 21st century creatures understand Greek comedies and tragedies easily, and the Greeks would have no trouble understanding the plots of our current television shows, movies, and novels. On the other hand, they’d be bewildered by our cities, our household appliances, our media. Human culture changes very quickly, and the habits and ways of thinking apt for one culture or one era can be anachronistic or even maladaptive in another time and place.
I have no doubt that, over time, the new digital media (NDM) will change our minds—both their contents and their manner of processing information. But the most profound media effects occur slowly. Plato was afraid that writing would change thinking and memory, and he was right about that—but it took decades, perhaps centuries, for the ways that we write to alter the way that we speak, categorize, remember, or distort. So, too, the changes that were wrought by the printing press, the telegraph, and the broadcast media were substantial, but not immediately manifest or understood.
Though he is much criticized nowadays, Marshall McLuhan had genuine insights here. McLuhan argued that new media invariably begin by presenting the contents of the old media: radio and movies first presented the theatrical stage, television initially was visually-presented radio, and so on. This characterization is even true of the NDM, whose initial games, webcasts, search engines, and social networks draw heavily on prototypes developed in a predigital age. It takes time to arrive at the forms of presentation that take advantage of the distinctive features of each new medium.
On the other hand, another of McLuhan’s aphorisms may prove timebound. McLuhan famously contended “The medium is the message.” The classic example here is the 1960 television debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Those who heard the debates on radio thought that the authoritative-sounding Vice President had won on points; those who watched the debates on television felt more in synch with the young Senator from Massachusetts. But increasingly, the print, broadcast, and other communication media are merging; in the future, users may pay no attention to the source of, or the means employed by, converging media.
Returning to the question at hand, two spheres that have been most immediately impacted by the new digital media are politics and commerce. Political candidates and operatives need to master the new media of communication, lest they become victims thereof; and any company or corporation that attempts to operate without employing the speed, flexibility, and advertising powers of the NDM is likely to have a short life. We can call these changes in human culture—more fundamental aspects of human cognition, emotion, and character are not significantly altered.
On Friday Gardner will explore the question: Where will the most profound effects of digital media occur?
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Mechelle De Craene (James Buchanan Middle School)
4/5/07
11:04am
Hi Professor Gardner,
Carl Sagan (1977) poignantly ostensifies in his book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence that human beings have in the most recent few tenths of a percent of existence, invented not only extragenetic knowledge, but also extrasomatic knowledge, of which writing is the most notable example… that is until now with ICT.
Recently Dr. John Cuthell (my mentor from the UK) presented our research on Drafting the Architecture towards a Digital IQ at a recent education conference. We also touched on your MI Theory along other intelligence theories with our research on child development and ICT.
With that, I was wondering will you potentially be including digital intelligence in your MI Theory?
I wanted to also pose the question could the message and the medium eventually change intelligence and or our notions of it? As a teacher I believe so, what are your contentions?
Thank you kindly for your time.
Kind Regards,
Mechelle : )
Robert K. Blechman (St. George's University)
4/16/07
4:28pm
I think you’re spot on with regard to the biases of current media and the impact they are having on our politics and corporations. In our analysis of culture, we Media Ecologists consider the biases regarding time and space of a medium and what attitudes, beliefs and institutions those biases encourage. Harold Innis would have noted whether a medium has permanence and therefore enables communication over time, or is portable and therefore encourages communication over space. This frame of reference has been amended by Walter J. Ong who noted that the salient feature of any human culture is whether it is completely or primarily oral and shapes it cultural institutions around the oral/aural transmission of information or is literate, possessing a means of writing down and transmitting information through sight.
McLuhan would have added that any technology can be investigated in a four-fold manner. What does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What does it retrieve that had been lost? What does it reverse into when pushed to an extreme?
The older media have a spatial bias. They can influence mass audiences over great distances, but until recently, were ephemeral. Access to recordings of old programming or even films was not universally available. In primary orality, human memory and speech were the means by which information was stored and transmitted. In the manuscript and print era, writing allowed a disconnect between the source of the message and the recipient. Until recently, any film, TV or radio program was here today and gone tomorrow, thereby mimicking the operation of primary orality cultures. Our transmission of the content of those media remained largely oral, with some commentary in writing.
With regard to the Internet and the accompanying digital media (cell phones, cheap digital recorders and editors, etc.) it seems to me that the medium of the Internet encourages and augments the transition begun with film, radio and television to a culture of secondary orality. The new digital media remove the spatial bias of the older media by allowing the recording and replay of anything anywhere. The Internet allows for the immediate retrieval and replay of almost everything and adds external memory to our secondary orality media. This is the true transformation of our culture that we are witnessing. For example, before YouTube, the recent Imus imbroglio would have been inconceivable. His comments would have faded away immediately after they were delivered. The new media preserves moments like these (Imus? racial slur, George Allen?s ?macaca? remark, etc.) for continuous review.
Robert K. Blechman
I invite you to visit my blog ?A Model Media Ecologist? at http://www.robertkblechman.blogspot.com where I discuss the impact of media on our culture.
Mechelle De Craene (James Buchanan Middle School)
4/16/07
6:38pm
Professor Blechman,
Re: “In our analysis of culture, we Media Ecologists consider the biases regarding time and space of a medium and what attitudes, beliefs and institutions those biases encourage.”
Hmmm…this is interesting. Do media ecologists take into consideration child development with regard to media, time and space as well? Or is it mainly an analysis through an adult perspective of media?
It is my contention that children have very different perceptions of media depending on developmental level.
I?ve noticed that children generally under the age of 7, have a different perception of time. They exhibit an ego-centric schema of time, which will often transfer onto digital media. Then when (if) the child reaches the concrete stage developmentally they develop the schema that Cyberspace time is simultaneous?that Cyberspace is like Minkowski?s theory of ?Flat-Space Time” (i.e. special relativity) which was proposed in 1907.
Moreover, when we asked children,?If an email was sent from a friend next door and from a friend in China, which would they receive first?? The younger children often say next door because it is closer. Whereas, the old children will often say it depends on the server.
In sum, children often help us to see the world in a new way…including digital media.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1798) believed that, “Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and there is nothing more foolish than the attempt to put ours in their place.”
Robert K. Blechman (St. George's University)
5/3/07
11:53am
Hi Mechelle,
Your comments on the ways children interpret media is right on point. It would be very interesting to conduct a series of Piagetian tests at different stages of development visavis a child’s perception of the various media.
I recommend two books: <i>No Sense of Place<> by Joshua Meyerowitz, <i>The End of Childhood<> by Neil Postman. With regard to the media, both Meyerowitz and Postman deal with the meta effects of media usage.
It is argued that the very distinction between adult and child is a product of literacy. In a literate age, adults could keep “secrets” from children because the acquisition of literacy required years of study. However, comprehending the electronic media requires no schooling. Children at the youngest ages can view television discussions on all sorts of formerly “adult” topics, including death and war, sex and sexual deviance and politics and political scandal.
Meyerowitz states that this accessibility has blurred the distinction between adult and child and accounts for the sexualization of children in our media and acceptance of this in our lives.
Postman believed that, being a visual, non-discursive medium, television encourages a different kind of thinking as compared to reading. Immediacy, non-linearity (or non-logicality) and, to throw in Claude Levi-Strauss, “transcendetal deduction” are the result. Considering the hours spent viewing vs. the hours spent reading, the child of our age is different from the pre-electronic child.
Rousseau, of course, was himself a product of literacy, and was among the first to see childhood as qualitatively different from adulthood.
Nichole Pinkard (University of Chicago)
5/6/07
3:50pm
If as McLuhan and Gardner argue, the medium is the message then the task of educators is to prepare youth to understand the affordances and constraints of the medium both as consumers and as producers. While, this task is not new, the democratization of media production via the creation of affordable, user-friendly authoring tools means that in order to participate in conversations one is expected to be able to ?read? more that just the traditional mediums of print and radio. Today, one can participate in the conversation via print, radio, broadcast, graphics, video, simulations and to some degree games. Often, one participates in the conversation with multiple mediums at the same time-(multitasking- watching CNN while checking out youtube and reading the latest posting on one?s favorite blogs.
The drastic increase in the ability of the average ?Joe? and ?Jane? to create in these new or rather more accessible mediums places a tremendous strain on educators to adapt. However, we know that educators, particularly K-12, are the least to learn to read these newly widely accessible mediums on their own. However, I think all is not lost because when asked many K-12 educators are willing to bring these newly widely accessible mediums into their classrooms as long as they are not personally responsible for teaching youth how to use them.
Thus, I see a tremendous opportunity for the development of both programs that prepare youth (outside of the school day) and for the development of project materials that provide teachers with resources, steps, and exemplars of how to use media in their instruction. These materials need to be multimedia based and not just text based as teachers need to be able to ?see? the projects in action.
If we can figure out how to connect both opportunities for youth to learn to read mediums and opportunities for teachers to embed mediums into their instruction then more youth will be prepared to read and create the message from a variety of mediums.
Mechelle De Craene (James Buchanan Middle School)
5/20/07
12:43pm
Hi Professor Blechman,
Thank you for your encouragement.
Re: “It would be very interesting to conduct a series of Piagetian tests at different stages of development visavis a child’s perception of the various media.”
My mentor Dr. John Cuthell and I have been doing just that research. We presented our initial findings at the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education Conference back in March ‘06. Our framework was tentatively called ‘Techno-Developmental Levels” back then, but we have renamed it to Cybernetic Developmental Theory. Here’s the abstract link:
http://www.editlib.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Reader.ViewAbstract&paper_id=22393
I can send you the PowerPoint if you’d like. I’m hoping this will be my eventual dissertation. I’ve just got to find a university in the states that will mentor me on this project. Most of my course work is in psychology and special education. I am a full time teacher…first in my family to go to college and took night classes. Needless to say, I’ve found more mentoring online for my research on child development and ICT through the MirandaNet Academy that I have found at US universities.I haven’t been able to find a mentoring professor to match with in the US that will advise my research for a dissertation. The special ed professors don’t know much about technology and the technology professors don’t know much about child development. Thus, I continue to do my research because I am passionate about learning as much as I can to help kids. However, it would be nice to eventually earn my PhD…perhaps one day. But I digress….
Thank you so much for the book references. I look forward to reading them over summer.
Hi Professor Pinkard,
I really enjoyed your talk when visiting Chicago for the video games and learning forum. I was just wondering can you please elaborate on the statement you made, “However, we know that educators, particularly K-12, are the least to learn to read these newly widely accessible mediums on their own.”
May I ask which research you are gathering this statement from? And in what context?
I think that many don’t really realize that the digital divide affects teachers too. Many forget that most teachers live check to check and many are single moms. The UK had a good solution to help their teachers:
http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=re&catcode=ss_res_pro_bps_lap_04 Perhaps it is something to consider for teachers in the US as well.
Kind Regards,
Mechelle : )
Robert K. Blechman (St. George's University)
5/21/07
7:18pm
Hi Nicole,
A field of inquiry which is attempting to do some of the things you mention is Media Ecology.
The principles of Media Ecology are being developed by the Media Ecology Association at http://www.media-cology.org and also at my blog “A Model Media Ecologist” at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Here are some quick bullets:
*Media Ecology is a meta discipline. *Media Ecology is itself a medium which contains all other disciplines as its content.
*The purpose of Media Ecology is to make manifest the unconscious assumptions of a culture, assumptions
which may have largely been determined by the tools the culture uses to express itself.
*The goal of Media Ecology is to free humans from that unconscious bondage and allow them to make choices concerning their tools, to use their
tools rather than letting their tools use them.
As such, Media Ecology would appear to contain a literate bias in that it
seeks, through a logical analysis, to bring to the foreground what was hidden in the background. Media Ecology seeks to replace ritual with logic and
impulse with discernment.
Neil Postman would have freely admitted this, have promoted the practice of Media Ecology as a methodology, in our electronic age, to return to the literate values of the Enlightenment.
However, as Marshall McLuhan demonstrated, the path to Media Ecological enlightenment can be pursued through the use of probes and aphorisms as readily as through logical discourse. In fact, McLuhan’s methods may illustrate ways to find shortcuts to the truth.