COM 2033 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Deal With The Devil, Marshall Mcluhan, Media Ecology
Document Summary
Think about the force of the medium as a whole, not just about the impact of some specific content. Metaphor about the burglar with the juicy piece of meat. Meat: content that tempts or distracts us. The content has impact but the medium through which it is conveyed also has an impact. The modes of communication shape us, not just the content passing through those modes. For example, the phenomenon of the couch potato. Analogy: form is to medium as content is to message. News is the best available version of truth at the moment. We shape our tools and they in turn shape us. We use these tools over and over again and they have become a part of us, an extension of ourselves. Our senses are conditioned to particular sensibilities, as griffin says. An example is the way a blind person develops a heightened sense of hearing. The influence of content is more direct and obvious.
