A Medium Is Useless Without a Message!

When reading Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, it is safe to say that I had no idea what he was really getting at originally. Then after our class discussion about it on Tuesday, I had a better idea of what he was trying to say, although I must say I tend to disagree with him. Much of what I will say is similar to what I just read in Kate’s blog, but I too think that without a message there would be no use for a medium.

In the first chapter we read of McLuhan, he stated the “medium is the message”, and I took this as meaning that the medium is the way which content is delivered, so it is what is important. The medium is the act of getting a message across, so using a movie as an example; the medium would be the entire filmmaking process. The actual content of the movie would be the message. I do not have any problems with the distinction between the two, and I actually think he makes good sense in how he characterizes them. Yet, he tends to separate them, insinuating that message is of little importance, and it is only the medium that matters. I think in one way he is right, which is that one person’s blog may be a message that has absolutely no significance when compared to the idea of the internet as a medium. Yet, there are two reasons why I feel he is incorrect. First, most messages probably are not significant in and of themselves, but the fact there are messages out there to begin with makes the medium have usefulness. Secondly, sometimes the message is very significant. I have two examples, the first being McLuhan’s example of the railroads and how the “content of the railway medium” (24) was insignificant. One of the main things railways carried was coal, and while that may not have been significant at the time, it is now a major issue with fossil fuels and global warming. So the content being coal was very important in that situation in what it has done to the environment and economy. A second example would be Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “I Have a Dream”. By my understanding, McLuhan would say that the speech’s content is unimportant, but the act of speaking and giving speeches is the important part. I agree that the speechmaking process is important and is necessary for quality speeches to occur, but without the quality speeches themselves, then the process would have little importance.

The second part of McLuhan’s reading was about the hot and cold media and the differences between the two. From the reading and class discussion, a hot medium is one that has low participation, high definition and more information whereas a cool medium has high participation, low definition, and less information. McLuhan categorized many media into one or the other, and the main problem I had with this is that you can only compare two media at a time. When comparing radio versus a telephone, it makes perfect sense that a telephone would be the cold medium and radio the hot since a telephone gives you less information and definition while requiring a much higher level of participation. Yet that should not make radio a hot medium in my eyes because you could compare it to a movie, which I would argue requires even less participation and gives you much more information. So when comparing those two, radio would be a cold medium. I think there should be a gradient used where one end is the hottest medium and the other is the coldest medium, because the lines are not very clear-cut. This was obvious when the class discussion covered the idea of TV as being a cold medium, which I feel may have been a product of McLuhan’s time but also that it may be cold in comparison to some other forms of media, but hotter than other ones.

I do think McLuhan makes some very interesting arguments but the “medium is the message” idea is a little too out there for me. He does show how important the medium is though, and that should not be ignored. Without media, we would have no messages but in the same sense, without messages, we’d have no use for the media. I definitely feel the two are intertwined and cannot be separated out completely.