blog #8

According to Mark Federman’s essay, “What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?”, this phrase/idea, “the medium is the message” introduced by Marshall McLuhan, is the most popular and most frequently searched phrase on the internet. McLuhan says that “we tend to focus on the obvious” (Federman). He basically says that the reader or the watcher or the listener takes into their mind what they want to hear or see based on how they initially feel about the topic. Everyone is indeed entitled to their own opinions, which makes or breaks how they feel about what they are seeing or hearing. He says that the outcome of this is that we look back and see how these new things have created something else for us and he calls these “unintended consequences” (Federman).

Federman writes “many of the unanticipated consequences stem from the fact that there are conditions in our society and culture that we just do not take into consideration in our planning”, which leads to Stephen Kern’s essay, “Wireless World.” Kern writes about the Titanic and describes the Titanic hitting the iceberg scene. He goes onto describe how the wireless connection has opened up doors and “the ability to experience many distant events at the same time, mad possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major chance in the experience of the present” (Kern, 188). This is an example of the “unintended consequence”, as Federman refers to it as an “unanticipated consequence.” This incident of the Titanic opened up the doors of opportunity for the telephone to be invented, allowing two people in different places to talk to each other without having to go to each other. Going back to what Federman wrote, he also writes after, “these range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions.” The Titanic sinking made it into history making it a historical precedent that brought about this “unanticipated consequence.”

         McLuhan makes it clear that the audience views all types of media according to however they want to see it and make analyses and look deep into media according to their own beliefs and opinions. Also, how we are so focused on what is right in front of us that we do not see anything else that is happening around us such as the outcomes of different incidents, like the Titanic example Kern used, and how it helped develop better technology to advance our society.

Going back to the phrase “the medium is the message”, what McLuhan means by this is how the message is perceived is all up to how influential the medium is to a person, how he or she is views the medium as a whole and what sort of opinions, negative or positive, he or she has towards the medium.

Federman, Mark. "What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message? ." utoronto. N.p., 10 Nov. 2010.Web. 10 Nov. 2010. <http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm> 

Kern, Stephen. "Wireless World." Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society. Author: David Crowley and Paul Heyer. 6th ed. Pearson, 2011. 187-190.