The Medium is the Massage

This is a response to "The Medium is the Massage" (film)

The film "The Medium is the Massage" by Marshall Mcluhan is a very interesting documentary, if it should be called that, on how society exists with all the current and past mediums "massaging us" or "roughing us up". To quote McLuhan "a medium is not something neutral, it roughs you up" Mcluhan makes a claim which i found very true, when ever a new medium arises, a medium that tends to interact with the public frequently, the public tends to live in the recent past. McLuhan's example was when suburbia started to come into existence all across the nation, people "lived in Bonanza" land.

Another wonderful point made by Mr. McLuhan is that most new medium's tend to use the old mediums as content. For proof, just look at the majority of our class's Frankenstein monsters, they almost all incorporated older paintings of people or limbs.

McLuhan mentions how "everyone is involved in everyone" and that recalled our earlier reading on the railroad. The railroad allowed physical connections between cities states and countries, and following closely behind that the telegraph which allowed for an information connection that eventually stretched over the atlantic ocean. It seems that as time goes on we humans enmesh ourself more and more with these systems of interaction and information. Now we have phones, cars, planes, the internet etc... that seems to put (as advertisers love to say) 'the world in the palm of our hand' Everything is here at the touch of a button and the flip of a switch. McLuhan says that "the world is made of simultaneous relationships"- everything happens now. All we want is the result, we have cut out the process (in many situations).

I never really considered Television to "require participation", but then the example of President Kennedy's funeral and all of a sudden i had to agree. It does make sense, why do people get so addicted to tv shows? They invest themselves in the experiences and the characters. In a superficial way, they are experiencing a different life than their own.

McLuhan's film brings up many issues that alert the public to the trends and realities that new media's especially television have on our lives.