Week 5 Blog

This week in class, we discussed Marshall McLuhan and his ideology about media and the medium of the message. McLuhan's theory was quite hard to understand at the beginning after reading and watching the videos provided for this week, but after the discussion in class, I had a better understanding of what it meant.

McLuhan was a philosopher who's work was centred around media theory. He published a book called 'Understanding Media' where he developed his concept of "the medium is the message". We looked at McLuhan's idea in relation to understanding tools and how they effect our behaviours and how they effect the wider society.

What helped me to get a better comprehension of McLuhan's theory was the YouTube video by BBC Radio 4 "The Medium is the Message". In this video, Gillian Anderson states "McLuhan's genius was to focus on the medium itself....the technology that transfers the messages changes us and changes society, the individual, the family, work, leisure and more" (1:00).

This concept of the 'medium changing us' refers to how we consume media and how that effects us. In class we discussed the idea of reading making people more literate and possibly more intelligent. We then touched on the idea of how watching television can make people less literate. McLuhan believed that print based culture encouraged an emphasis on the visual and that in the earlier oral culture, when all they had was speech, this encouraged an emphasis on the ear (BBC Radio 4).

In terms of today's most popular medium, social media, it has effected society on a wider global scale. With the use of portable smart phones, people are constantly connected from around the world. The use of the internet and social media has created a "global village' (BBC Radio 4). The use of the internet and social media today as a medium has evolved into whole other virtual world. We create profiles for ourselves online with pictures and a persona and we connect to people from all around the world. This is creating an extension of ourselves. 

The new age of mobile phones as a medium has effected us both good and bad. People tend to be absent in the physical world, you know when you are at a dinner table and someone spends every minute on their phone? it is difficult to share a conversation and they don't feel present. Or on public transport have you ever looked around you? it is complete silence due to every person having their head in their phones.

On the bright side, smart phones as the new form of message mediums have connected humanity all around the world and have created a global community.

To finish off this weeks blog, I have an update on my group project. We met on Monday the 8th of March to discuss the readings and make a move on our presentation. We each chose a topic to discuss in relation to our chosen future work environment (VR) and I chose to do sustainability. We each have to prepare 2 slides each on our topic and then we will combine all of our slides together.

Refrences:

BBC Radio 4 (2015), The Medium is the Message, available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko6J9v1C9zE (Accessed: 11/03/2021).