MODULE 9FOCUS ON THE MEDIUMMARSHALL MCLUHAN ON TECHNOLOGY

Art 100Understanding Visual Culture

agenda

defining “medium” brief introduction to McLuhan’s

thought exploring an extended example

This physical form is a medium, plural media.

Every representation exists in a physical form.

Weegee, Their First Murder, 1941

Though photographs may seem like “transparent” records of reality, they too exist in a specific medium.

For example, reality moves on, while this photograph is static, freezing a single moment in time.For example, reality is in color, while this photograph is in back and white.For example, we don’t see well at dusk but a flash illuminates this scene for us.

A medium is something in the middle—in between us and the depicted scene. As a physical presence with its own special properties, we must consider it carefully.

Definition: medium

The “media” is shorthand for the “mass media”—print, radio, television, and internet as important examples.

Definition: media

Marshall McLuhan

(1911-1980) Prescient theorist of

the media and its effects.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Understanding Media (1964)

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

Yousef Karsh, Portrait of McLuhan, 1974

Technology is transformative.

McLuhan regards each new technology developed as an “extension of man”—a change in our human capabilities that significantly changes our sense of what it means to be human.

Technology is not neutral.

Technology is not neutral.

McLuhan uses electricity as an example of a medium.Still from City Lights (1931), dir. Charlie Chaplin

On p. 24, McLuhan states that: “...the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

The message of these signs, for McLuhan, is not their literal text, but the aggregated ways in which electricity has transformed our human lives.

So, what is the “message” of electricity? How has it transformed human existence?

Consider our world…

…before electricity

Compare our experience of the electrified night.

What has changed?

The Earth at Night, November 2000composited satellite imagery, NASA

In what regions of the world is it still possible to see the night sky?

Artist Edward Hopper loved to depict the alienating glare of the electrified night.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942 oil on canvas, 33 1/8 x 60 inches, Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Hopper

Office at Night

1940

oil on canvas

22 3/16 x 25 3/16 inches

Edward Hopper

Automat

1927

oil on canvas

28 1/8 x 36 inches

“…the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

In other words, McLuhan urges us not to look through the medium as if it were transparent, look at the medium to see what it does and how it has changed us.

p. 32

So, what is the “message” of electricity?

“The message of the electric light is…totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized.” (p. 25)

Our very way of being in the world has changed completely.