ePortfolio

Journal 8: Medium

 

McLuhan views medium as a very important process by which information (the message) can be obtained from.  To him, the “manifestation of …processes” builds up to a final resolution or purpose.  Much of the time, little processes or presented material is not made clear until a certain significant moment.  These are “fragments before a peak”.  No one knows for sure what the final reveal is because travelling uphill reduces visibility.  It is only when all the puzzle pieces are collected, can conclusions be drawn and the image is clarified.  

 

Medium can be content.  It is the means; it is what is presented to a reader or audience.  McLuhan makes several technology references involving mechanisms and electric light.  In this way, I think he is he trying to portray that things happens in parts and stages.  He also says that says that “it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine”.  My interpretation of this is that sometimes the actual message (what is being explicitly said) doesn’t actually matter in the long run.  It’s the implicit implications that require reading between the lines; looking at the medium, at the process, at the how.

 

I’m not sure if I have any actual questions for McLuhan about Medium, but I did find his work to be difficult to keep up with.  He was particularly wordy and used a lot of examples that were sometimes repetitive, but sometimes enlightening.  

Medium is the means by with the author portrays a message to their audience.  This message can be developed uniquely by the author, incorporating their knowledge into the work.  In doing so, they sometimes apply the principles of a rhetorical situation into the piece and genre and medium are more closely related since genre is a subcategory of “how” the message is presented.