COMM 1101 Lecture Notes - Smoke Signal, Onstar, Indirect Rule
Document Summary
Don"t become too smitten or distracted by content in evaluating the significance of media. New media are often imagined in terms of old media. Have to look at medium, not the content, in order to understand. Carr on the dominance of oral communication over writing. Patterns developed through oral speaking; oral communication is not gone, but writing and reading are more dominant. If something is important, build redundancy into message. Old writing didn"t have pauses or punctuation; much more labourious. Through perspective of transmitting things, however, it"s inefficient; in message compression, it"s extraneous damaging when it costs a lot of money to transmit a message. Mcluhan pointed to examples where the medium was the message ; the. Content of a new medium is the old medium. Mcluhan: content of writing was speech, the previous medium; printing become the content of print books; cell phones have many other applications on them.