Marshall McLuhan is famous for his assumption that "The medium is the message". He tries to portray this in the opening chapter of his book Understanding Media. My opinion of this reading - what on earth are you talking about? It was like wading through treacle.
McLuhan does say that this means the "personal and social consequences of any medium - this 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" (McLuhan, 2001[1964]: 7). He also notes that media can be seen as amplifiers, meaning that a human sense is extended. I can identify with the fact that a camera can extend our sight and a phone can extend our early. However, I do not understand the concept that our skin can be extended through clothes. This can be related to Haraway's piece on cyborgs in Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature, as she says that "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism" (Haraway, 1991: 150). We rely on technology and machine all day everyday, which makes us cyborgs. This can include glasses, hearing aids, medication and immunization. Now I know you'll have an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in your head. McLuhan describes the message as “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan, 2001 [1964]:8).
Throughout this opening chapter, McLuhan uses the notion of an electric light to illustrate his point. He describes it as being "pure information", but also as "a message without a medium"(McLuhan, 2001[1964]: 7). However, it could be used to spell something out, such as a road sign on a motorway. It's telling that there is a delay up ahead and that that junction 20 is closed off. Other activities involving the electric light that McLuhan mentions include night baseball and brain surgery, suggesting that the activities are the "content" of the electric light as without it they wouldn't exist
(McLuhan, 2001[1964]: 9).
If you were to apply this notion to a form of media culture, you could see that there is a need to consider the possible effects that could form as a result. For advertising, which McLuhan discusses in a following chapter in Understanding Media, he describes it as “a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition” which will “gradually assert itself” (McLuhan, 2001[1964]: 247). This shows the effects that they can have. People want to be like those in the adverts, but in extreme case this can lead to psychological and physical effects such as bulimia and anorexia, as people want a new self-image. Some messages of adverts are overshadowed by by-products, which have a greater impact than the object. The main case of this is the fact a price comparison website has thought that the word "market" sounds like "meerkat".
This reminds me to some extent of Fight Club, which isn't just about blokes knocking seven bells out of one another. There is a degree of McLuhan's notion in this film, because at the beginning of the film the main character is living in a flat which is full of IKEA furniture. "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" That seems familiar to McLuhan's theory applied to advertising, because people's expectations have been raised and how they pay more something because of the brand. You may be wanting to know the relevance of this. Well, it appears to me to be more relevant and appropriate for the notion than McLuhan using the examples of Shakespeare. He does come across as having his own monopoly over credible thinking, especially when he is being critical of David Sarnoff, calling him "the voice of the current somnambulism" (McLuhan, 2001 [1964]:11). I wonder what Sarnoff's opinion of McLuhan would be...
