[HN Gopher] This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message ...
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This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (1967) [video]
Author : poetically
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-12-05 06:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of
| Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the
| first read feel illuminating. I felt the same way when first
| reading Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guttari, Micheal
| Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida. After a cursory rereading at an
| age older than 18, I realized how badly I had been deceived.
|
| I just do not buy this idea of "hyperreality", or that somehow
| media representations meaningfully "distort reality". Actually,
| the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't
| because of the media). The map is NOT the territory. The medium
| is NOT the message (or even a "massage", but maybe a "mass age").
| I do not deny that a medium has impact on the message, but this
| notion of it being identical or even worth speaking about as
| though they are identical is so alien and absurd to me I cannot
| even figure out where it started.
|
| I will give credit to Marshall Mcluhan for not writing in an
| insufferable or "fashionable nonsense" style like the others I
| have compared him to. He is a fine but definitely overrated
| author.
| handrous wrote:
| My grasp on "the medium is the message" is that it's _in part_
| a technological-determinism argument. The message a medium will
| convey, or perhaps the _space_ of messages it may end up
| conveying in practice, is determined by the nature of the
| medium itself--how it 's created, how it's distributed, how
| it's experienced--resisting attempts to use it for other
| purposes. That aspect of it, at least, seems useful and to have
| some truth to it.
| mountain_peak wrote:
| Love the 'fantasy' scene [0] in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's
| character 'pulls out' Marshall McLuhan to put an intellectual
| blowhard back into place. McLuhan says, "I heard what you were
| saying. You know nothing of my work - you mean my whole fallacy
| is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is
| totally amazing."
|
| Maybe a cameo in a movie meant that McLuhan didn't take himself
| too seriously. I find his ideas relatively 'approachable',
| although I'm fairly skeptical whenever reading any
| philosophical work. Just recently, I had to deal with
| phenomenological and heuristic approaches to qualitative
| studies. I see some value, but (as a scientist) the lack of
| rigor and consistency makes my head spin.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| There's a quote I only half remember and am probably
| misattributing, but my memory is Bruce Sterling saying
| something like "I used to get excited by reading French
| postmodern philosophers until I realized they were actually
| saying something."
| u385639 wrote:
| This is interesting - provoking. Can you share some
| authors/material that has influenced your awakening, so to
| speak?
| pphysch wrote:
| I agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st
| century philosophers dug up classical German/Western
| philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it.
| That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could
| take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank --
| grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of
| generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual
| integrity (see: Sokal hoax).
|
| _Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
| Philosophy_ (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the
| death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late
| development of classical German philosophy in particular. It
| 's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok
| the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions.
|
| This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx
| in his final _Thesis on Feuerbach_ (1845): "Philosophers
| have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the
| point is to change it."
|
| The upshot is that the best way to understand
| writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand
| their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is
| sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and
| interests of the audience? Presume market forces before
| presuming intellectual rigor.
| poetically wrote:
| So you don't think the medium has an effect on how people
| think about and perceive the world?
| pphysch wrote:
| I'm not convinced it's a useful abstraction. It is
| obvious that text vs. pictures vs. sound and so on have
| different semantic capabilities, e.g. try describing a
| new color to someone who has never had functional eyes.
|
| However, it is not something I would read or write books
| exclusively about.
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%2
| 0Po...
| waserwill wrote:
| I'm interested in how culture changes and where it can
| go/is going. Knowing about what ideas or forms of
| thinking different media favor -- this seems useful to
| me. It's part of the 'selective landscape' of culture.
| poetically wrote:
| What exactly is the abstraction here? McLuhan is
| describing something very concrete that is not obvious to
| most people.
| cbreynoldson wrote:
| McLuhan speaks in exaggerated language - it's important to not
| take everything he says too literally, and to instead judge the
| essence of the ideas.
|
| "The Medium is the Message" because without context (the
| media), messages are just noise. McLuhan was all about seeing
| the contexts we live in, how they shape our reality, etc.
| pnathan wrote:
| I would put it this way: his theory would predict that
| 140-character twitter would result in a different culture and
| thought process than Livejournal, and both would be different
| from Tiktok, which would in turn be different than Twitch - all
| entirely due to the constraints on the medium. that is a useful
| theory.
|
| (do I think he probably took too much LSD and got high on his
| own theories? yes. but its at least adequate as a predictive
| starting point - and what more can we ask of any model?)
| gdubs wrote:
| First read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didn't
| quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didn't quite grasp
| it. Was only a few years back, when I looked at social media
| through the lens of the book that I finally got the "ah ha"
| moment. I can't say how much it holds up overall, but it's
| definitely mind-expanding.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Tom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the
| late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw
| (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's
| outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio
| that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so
| word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his
| entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around
| that kind of premise.
| briga wrote:
| McLuhan isn't really an author to grasp so much as he is an
| author to be grasped by. He's often difficult to understand but
| I think the point isn't so much to understand so much as, like
| you said, to expand your mind to new possibilities. His most
| powerful writing has an aphoristic, koan-like quality designed
| more to be provocative than to say anything specific. This can
| be mildly infuriating but at its best it's visionary stuff.
| marttt wrote:
| UbuWeb has also collected interviews and other audio gems
| about/featuring McLuhan, including two tracks from the late 1960s
| Columbia Records' LP "The Medium is the Massage":
| https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html
|
| And there's also a 1999 documentary film about McLuhan entitled
| "Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan":
| https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan.html
|
| Years ago, I would spend hours browsing UbuWeb. What a treasure
| trove! It also pays to point out that while the site was launched
| in 1996 (by artist-poet Kenneth Goldsmith), its UI has remained
| more or less the same since about 2005.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| And now, increasingly, the tribe is the message, and each tribe
| aligns with their own medium.
| Fricken wrote:
| Marshall McLuhan had some things to say about "peer to peer
| electronic media" in the 1970s, and amongst was a concern that
| it would provoke tribalism.
| the-dude wrote:
| Even if this were true, it is nothing new : in The Netherlands
| after WWII every religious / political fraction had its own
| public broadcast group ( channels / stations are shared ),
| schools, sport clubs, news papers, labor unions etc.
|
| There was even a word for it : _verzuiling_ [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967)
| [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250 - April
| 2015 (27 comments)
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| McLuhan's dissertation, "The Classical Trivium," is well worth
| the read:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learni...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| TIL, thanks!
|
| You might be able to find a copy at a library. It's _not_ at
| Archive.org / OpenLibrary or LibGen. Yet.
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/classical-trivium-the-place-o...
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I can confirm that a 223.28 MB PDF on Z-Library seems to be
| the work in question. (ISBN 1-58423-067-3) Their clearnet
| URLs are down right now, but the TOR link is up.
|
| http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem.
| ..
| [deleted]
| bullen wrote:
| The old media is the content until the new medium discovers it's
| own content, not possible in previous mediums.
|
| The global action 3D MMO that is built and modified by the user
| is the USP of the final medium: programming the internet!
| [deleted]
| aasasd wrote:
| TIL the original book was published in '64--kinda surprised to
| learn that, because by that time experiments with mediums were
| already quite widespread, particularly in literature (afaik):
| e.g. Principia Discordia, 'published' in '63. Pretty sure that
| suprematism and constructivism from the '15s and '20's were steps
| in this direction, and by the time of brutalism and general mid-
| century modernism, things were in full swing. Take Swiss
| modernism in print design: it's hard to _not_ get the message.
|
| By now, of course, the sentiment has permeated the culture--so in
| the recent discussion on Codex Seraphinianus, the comments
| immediately derail it to works that are 'weird' but play with the
| form at least as much as the content:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Typo, it should be "The Medium Is the Massage"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Correct for a technicality... <<There are four readings for the
| last word of the title, all of them accurate: _Message_ and
| _Mess Age_ , _Massage_ and _Mass Age_ >> (Marshall McLuhan)
|
| Linked by the submitter is the video; the text is at
| https://archive.org/details/Marshall.Mcluhan..The.Medium.Is....
| dang wrote:
| It's more fun and interesting than that - here's the entire
| quote:
|
| _Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and
| not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After
| the book came back from the typesetter 's, it had on the
| cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is
| the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan
| saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and
| right on target!' Now there are four readings for the last
| word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess
| Age, Massage and Mass Age._
|
| I've 'massaged' the title above - seems most in McLuhan's
| spirit.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The medium was supposed a soothing massage, and nowadays in some
| regions/channels the elicited emotion is,
|
| panic
|
| (Consistently with the text: <<Innumerable confusions and a
| profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great
| technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is,
| in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with
| yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts.>>)
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(page generated 2021-12-06 23:01 UTC)