.

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You have correctly guessed that all comments on my LJ posts have a value of one to me no matter how little information they may convey. Well done!

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That answers the question, then, doesn't it?

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Completely true. Online "debate" is one of the arenas where the medium is very much the message: if the actual content was at all relevant someone would historically have changed their mind at some point in the course of all that online argumentation, and of course no one ever has.

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Is it exclusively an online phenomenon, though? One often hears an artist say that s/he is pleased when hir work provokes a strong response; it doesn't matter whether the response is praise, protest, or bafflement, as long as the public is engaging with the work—that is, taking the medium (the response) as the measure of success, rather than the message (the content of the response).

Of course, this also brings up the issue of intensity of the message/content/response, which rather screws with McLuhan's neat little dichotomy...

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But what of the intensity of the medium? What then? Will no one think of the children?

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Cue joke about John Edwards.

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I went to school with a John Edwards, and I also recall one running for president at some point, but I assume that neither of these is the one you mean.

In any case, I put it to you that YOU are the message, Mr Black.

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From whom?

And what sort of message am I? Like a horse's head in your bed, a crow nailed to your door, a choir of angels?

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Well, put it this way, if, e.g., Holly puts one of her Raven Blacks in my living room, I like to put two of mine in the morgue.

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Is this some sort of reference to Magic: The Gathering?

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Should be "The medium is the massage". Madame Zhora, psychic readings and reflexology.

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McLuhan allowed one of his books to be entitled that after he was delighted by spelling errors, didn't he? Only in postmodern philosophy can typographical mistakes add rather than subtract value.

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Did he? Excellent. They missed a trick, though. The Imodium is the Message next time.

(Ooh, I like this being able to edit comments now!)

Edited at 2007-11-09 09:22 am (UTC)

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You're completely wrong verlaine. Plus, you smell.

That's at best exaggeration, you can't possibly smell him when he's on the other side of the Atlantic!

ETA: Wait a sec - did you change that post?


Edited at 2007-11-09 12:32 pm (UTC)

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did you change that post?

Only verlaine's notification inbox knows for sure.

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or maybe: the medium is the messuage.

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Aah, bless him. I have that book on my shelf. It's very "of it's time"!

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The medium is a message. The same message as the message? Maybe, maybe not.

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The message is dramatically transformed by the medium to the point where it isn't the same message at all. Witness how people respond completely differently to a handwritten letter than to an email. We may conclude that the message itself is of a relatively piffling level of importance.

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I think an undergraduate essay on post-modernism has escaped. Can someone round it up and take it home please?

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You'll never take it alive!

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this is an LJ comment

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True or false?

Yes.

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Alright then, smart alec:

"The medium is the message." True AND false?

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True AND false?

If that's the test condition, then the answer becomes "no".

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Ha! Now that I've pinned you down to a position, my victory is inevitable.

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The tricky thing is if you simply ask:

“The medium is the message.” True?

or

“The medium is the message.” False?

Then I can't get out of expressing an opinion if I answer.

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Tsk, that would just be railroading you. Not my style.

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Pfh, if the test is "true?" then the answer is yes and if it's "false?" then the answer is no. It doesn't help at all with the intended question.

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if the test is "true?" then the answer is yes

That would depend on what "is" is, as a certain US president once said. If is is "=" then you are correct. If it is "==", then you are not.

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There is no == or = involved. If the question is just the one word then it's like "if (true) ..." or "if (false) ..."

The "is" only occurs in *my* question, which would resolve correctly whichever form of = or == you used, since, well, the six possible settings are:
1. Statement: if the test is "true?" then the answer is yes. isform: test==true? Test: true. The answer is yes.
2. Statement: if the test is "true?" then the answer is yes. isform: test==true? Test: false. The answer is not yes (and the conditional statement didn't say it would be.)
3. Statement: if the test is "true?" then the answer is yes. isform: test=true? Test: doesn't matter, becomes true. The answer is yes.

And, meh, the same for the ones where test is being false so it all works.

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if medium == message
true
else
false
end

...is what I meant.

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I thought about using that answer, but I ultimately rejected it as being merely glib, rather than actually provocative. Well played!

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Unfortunately, I spend too long writing Ruby scripts to be able to resist the urge to give any other answer.

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Livejournal post, you say?

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and why not "the small is the message"?
Or "the Grande is the message?"
;-)

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So that's why I've been finding secret communiques in my lattes at Second Cup!

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Book from the Sky.

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Mixed media, of course, send mixed messages.

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μ, he transliterated.

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irritatingly false. i wish someone would tell (the ghost of) marshall mcluhan and all his dubious followers who call their work "media theory" to read chomsky and go home.

um, hello by the way. i found your journal through some livejournal friend we have in common - and i really like it.

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Why thank you. Hang on, you aren't a fake LJ account set up by one of my friends to combat my near-full-time defection to Facebook in recent months? <narrows eyes>

I think that "the medium is the message" is almost self-evidently false in and of itself, but that it's an absolutely genius statement to have come out with anyway, given the arenas of discussion it potentially opens up. I definitely believe there's something worth examining about the way people are receiving their information nowadays, independent of the information itself. But then I'm a philosophaster and a Chomsky virgin too!

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maybe - but what will that examination really tell you except how people are receiving their information these days? I don't know. It just doesn't go anywhere. Or if it does, it seems often to tunnel right into the twilight land of mass mind control paranoia. You know - because the military originally created most of our modern communications media, and because the medium is the message, the military are controlling our minds!! That sort of thing.

Not that Chomsky is entirely free of that, I guess. Anyway no we've never met before. you are canadian? nice meeting you.

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I think how people receive their information is really interesting though. From a UK-centric point of view, "buying a newspaper" may seem like an innocuous enough way of finding out what's gone on in the world since yesterday, but the picture you get - even if you eschew the commentary and lifestyle pages in favour of the raw news sections - is going to be completely different depending on whether you get a jolly, populist tabloid, a handwringing left-wing broadsheet or the hateful fear-and-loathing-mongering Daily Mail. The media may not BE the message, but I'm seeing a lot of instances of it tampering with the message so that it's effectively new.

Canadian? I'll have you know that I'm a red-white-and-blue-blooded citizen of the US of A. Who was raised from an early age in Great Britain and currently works semi-licitly in Edmonton, Alberta. I don't know what that makes me, really. If they threw me out of Canada tomorrow I'd probably head for Seattle or somewhere, I think.

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agreed, but that's still a question of the content of the newspaper. which you might argue is dictated by certain aspects of the medium (need to sell ads, readership, whatever) but the fact is that the information you read in the jolly tabloid is not communicated in a fundamentally different way than the information in the left-wing broadsheet. (except seriously, they still have broadsheets? are you from the 18th century?) it doesn't mean that the question of "media bias" isn't interesting, but saying that and saying the medium materially dictates the content are two different things.

I can't tell what that makes you either. So what kind of accent do you have? I assume that's how most people who don't know you decide your nationality.

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I think the content is basically irrelevant in terms of the experience you get from an English newspaper; they're selling mindsets, not actual useful information.

My accent is usually considered to be kind of Mexican; except by native Mexicans, who tend to identify it as Welsh.

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But could you imagine an English newspaper that sold a different kind of mindset? That's the real question. I don't read English newspapers, or really get what English people are about in general, so I can't say.

And I think I will just go ahead and consider you American. I like you, and America needs all the cool people it can get right now.

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