I loved the complexity of this week’s topic of ‘The Medium is the Message’. Not only is it a thrilling paradox to explore and destroy your brain cells over deciphering what it means, it makes you truly consider the importance of what the medium is and how it is being used to construct and add to a message. The message may be the message, but the kind of medium used is of greater importance to the information being denoted. This theory of Marshall McLuhan managed to stick for me with this quote;  

‘This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.’ McLuhan (1964, p. 1)

Without the medium, the message does not exist, making the medium extremely important in the act of the audience being able to conceptualise the message. It’s also worth noting that depending on which format the message is depicted, it may alter what is being ‘said’. To reference McLuhan further, the outcome of a brain surgery would be greatly altered by the use of light compared to the absence of it.

Simple…! Right?

~Bree

Reference List

McLuhan, M 1964, Understanding media: the extensions of man, McGraw-Hill Education, New York.