McLuhan

I found McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message to be quite a challenging idea, depending on the media in question. For example, as McLuhan describes on page 9, the electric light is not often thought of as a communication medium because the content of the message is difficult to unveil and when the content is not obvious, how can there be any message? He writes, "..it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action" (9). He brings up this point again in chapter two "Media: Hot and Cold" when he explains the difference between hot and cold media. I understood hot media to be, as he states, a form that requires little participation, and one that "extends one sense in 'high definition'" (21). Conversely, the cold media is one that is high in participation and completion, which he seemed to relate with the types of people who are interested in increasing knowledge and education. I wonder if he explains in this chapter (and perhaps I missed it) why the two different types of media are identified in this way. Perhaps it can be understood in this quote "Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be 'forgotten,' 'censored,' and reduced to a very cool state before it can be 'learned or assimilated" (23-24).McLuhan's point about how the print culture of a country or society homogenizes its people is still a very relevant concept, he writes, "...men in such a culture who have to be homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all" (17). The print culture gives the people a sense of individuality as well as bringing them all together in innovative "patterns of enterprise and monopoly" (23).

To address the prompt of why Marxists might have a problem with McLuhan's ideas about the "medium being the message," I have to admit that I had some difficulty in coming to any reasonable conclusion. Perhaps by ignoring (or devaluing) the content of the media and focusing instead on the media itself, people lend themselves more easily to manipulation or control. It seems that those who control the media (the bourgeoisie) simply use the power of their control of the medium itself to influence others. McLuhan seems to predict a future, if it is not here already, where people don't even understand the way they are receiving information or entertainment and blindly accept it as something they earned or deserve. Does this mean that Marxists value the message more than the medium, even if this message is directly given by the bourgeoisie? I suppose that as more people gain access to print (and other forms of media) the content and media begin to change in a way that reflects a greater scope of a social public.