“The Medium is the Message”.  That was the quote author Marshall McLuhan said when he explained the aspects of our culture through the media, but why is it so important to how we consume digital media? When we talk about the medium, we were thinking about change in our society through communication that we can provide with text messaging, videos, and other forms so we could interact with each other. But according to McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. 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.” Let’s just say that the medium is defined as an agency of communication that for example, if we use social media on our devices more in our spare time, our communication skills would be increased because of our advanced interaction so we could be able to spend more with each other in both the real world and the digital world today.

McLuhan also said that the medium is like art because he studied some selections from William Shakespeare including Romeo and Juliet and Othello to explain the problem of human society and how can the medium affect human beings as well. But he also pointed out that the medium could make a person a total narcissist because of self-admiration to the media and the medium could be different forms of art especially Cubism.  IBM and General Electric are examples of how companies can sell their products to obtain profits from their customers when they buy their items at a low price.

We also noticed that when watching television at homes, we pointed out that some television programs are the most popular due to the fact that they broadcast more episodes in every season than the rest but other were considered to be longest running television shows because they have been around for years with milestone episodes airing on different channels every week and that is why Professor Wilbur Schramm ran some tests on the TV screen but ended up receiving zero reports.

In the end, the medium is very important to the media because we communicate ourselves through social media and other forms to make our interaction more precise and the message it delivers shows us that we are individuals who could make conversations with each other but if we are not careful with ourselves, we would be narcissistic because we lack others so we could have more focus on ourselves, not other individuals, otherwise, we would be fine with making more interactions through human communication for not just digital media but our human community in society as well.

As we continue to learn about and develop new mediums for communication and media, we attempt to find more effective ways of transporting information from various sources to an individual or group of people. The more difficult accessing the information is, the less likely large sums of people are to use the methods at hand. In fact, they’re more likely to find their own ways of obtaining information, whether it be word of mouth rather than reading a newspaper or hand signals rather than deducing the intricate sounds of Morse code. Marshall McLuhan mad an interesting observation. He stated that “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” This one sentence encapsulates the essence of the evolution of communication. We went from handwriting pages, to typing them, to simply speaking them as a means of developing more efficient mediums for communication and media. In more modern times, we have numerous ways of communicating or receiving information to and from a wide variety of sources in the palms of our hands with smart phones. We no longer will be searching through the Sunday news specials to find out our news but rather Google search it or see what happens to be trending on Twitter at the moment. The information is so immediate that it seems almost obsolete to want to check anything else other than the handheld mediums we hold today. In fact, we may not even be using desktop computers if we continue on this path. The only reason many young people even consider these larger mediums is for school, work, or maybe needing stronger hardware for video games. However, we spend much of our time with media in particular on our phones and we typically prefer to do things on our phones. We don’t like to purchase calculators or check the news channel for weather because we have nearly instant access to all this information in our pockets. Soon, we may not want to wait for the booting up process of a desktop or the constant repairs needed for an old laptop when we can simply reply to an email through our Gmail app. Slowly but surely older mediums are going to become a thing of the past and only the past.

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “the medium is the message,” created by Marshall McLuhan means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. This can be proven in the article “The Medium is the Message,” when it is stated that “this fact merely underlines the point that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” This is true because the message represents both content and character and the content usually blocks us from seeing the character of the medium. For example, in the movie “Get Out” produced by Jordan Peele, one can look at the movie from the surface and see it as a horror film about white people using  black people for their physical traits combined with the brains of white people because of the content of the movie and how it is portrayed. However, there is an important character message that is blocked/overshadowed if you only pay attention or connect with the content which expresses an ignorance/dangerous mindset to racism/slavery and how it has become a routine for white people to go about their lives taking advantage of black people as a result of a deeply rooted fear of black people becoming empowered even though it is a known fact that whites are way more privileged than blacks. As stated in the article, “the message, it seemed, was the “content,” as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about. ” People tend to ask about why something is the way that it is such as why the movie took place in a specific environment or why an author chose to incorporate a specific theme/idea, but never what is this trying to teach me or what is the bigger picture at the end of this. The nature of the medium does control human action because depending on where someone views that content can affect their outlook or the opinion they develop. “The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium.” This was an interesting point because it goes to show that people only focus on content, so if there is a lack of it, they would rather scrap whatever it is that is not producing content rather than breaking down the overall theme or lesson. Content is entertaining for people especially coming from a wide named brand channel or publication.

A medium is defined as a channel or system of communication to which information or data can be obtained or transmitted. A medium is important to digital culture because the medium is literally “the message” in which the medium is how we decide to communicate with one another. The medium is the connection to how we receive or pass on the message, without the medium there is no way we can send or receive information about one another. There are multiple ways the medium can be presented especially since time and the digital media is always changing.

As time goes on and new media outlets and forms of communications are created the medium begins to change as well. Marshall McCluhan believes “For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content””. Basically stating that the mediums depend on one another, in order for the medium go function it is given the content of another medium, almost as if they build off one another. A negative aspect of the medium that McCluhan points out is the elimination of jobs due to new technology and new forms of human association.

Why is the medium so important to how we consume digital media?

In my opinion, the medium is extremely important to how we consume digital media. The way that bloggers and journalists  write their post, it gives the reader certain takeaways to create deeper conversation, and that’s a way that more controversy of the message is created. When i think of an example to this i think of what Jordan Peele does with the last couple movies that he directed (get out and us). Not only did those movies have the regular plots like any other suspenseful horror movie,  but it had a general medium that everyone could relate to, as hidden messages or deeper meaning like the involvement of racism or breaking down the levels of social class and understanding the difference between good vs evil. That helps people understand the real meaning behind what is being created and the message of why is it relevant or important to society. This is the same way that we can consume digital media from relating certain events with topic to go with it. “Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown. Professor Wilbur Schramm made such a tactical move in studying Television in the Lives of Our Children. He found areas where TV had not penetrated at all and ran some tests. Since he had made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image, his tests were of “content” preferences, viewing time, and vocabulary counts. In a word, his approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so. Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been employed in 1500 A.D. to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography. Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and “content” analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge” ( Marshall Mcluhan article).

The point that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association according to “The Medium is the Message.” In the article the examples they used were IBM and the General Electric Company. The way they use “the medium is the message” in these examples is that with IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but instead it was in the business of processing information they made a new identity as in find what they are actually good at. Then with General Electric Company “for electric light and power are separate from their uses, but they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.” Technically saying electric light is useful when it comes to sharing information. It can be used in form of a television, radio, or laptop. One starts to get the idea that medium is a message but interpreted in different ways across the media also can be shown not in the same way. There are factors that make each thing different like media platforms facebook and instagram both are social networks but are two completely things one can share everything on facebook while on instagram just photos and 60 second videos.

The medium is important to how we consume digital media because the medium is the connection to how the message is received by anyone. Without the medium, the content is nothing because it cannot be passed on. While some might portray certain mediums as negative or positive, the medium is neither. None of these mediums have a designated outcome. Most usually become predictable. For example, a news channel on television usually holds the negative media that happens locally. While we try to post only positive personal things on social media and share news (both sad & happy) that is happening around the world.

The medium changes with time leaving everyone with different ways to easily share media and content. It creates new forms of communication within society. Depending on the device and the message, there are different forms of mediums activating each one. Everyone moves on along with technology, making experiences and ways of thinking very different from before. Creating the “media theory” made McLuhan very famous. Innovation has changed us to care about how we send the message not what it actually is saying.

The reason why the medium is so important to how we consume digital media is because it is a physical material that we use such as CD, DVD, disk and hard disk that can be used to archive and store things such as video and audio files. The medium is used to communicate to people, there is a good in the use of medium. “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.” With this we can control what we see and what we out out. Also mentioned in the passage “The Medium is the Message” by Marshall McCluhan it states, “Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message” this basically explains how technology is taking over jobs of many today. Overall, this allows the consumer to gain a connection and speak about anything.