The Medium is the Message

Some brief thoughts about the McLuhan reading:
What struck me as the best part of the passage was concerned with the idea that it is not the medium itself that matters, it is how it is used. As such, we cannot excuse our behaviours for using electronic communications. Often I see folks walking around with heads down sending a text message. Often this happens when making plans without a set timeline. E.g. "I'll text you when I'm close by" instead of "Let's meet at 4pm at a designated area." With the use of this form of technology, accountability in being on time is fragmented. The piece of IQ testings as being "the grestest flood of misbegotten standards" (158) is well-known. IQ is not a reliable measure of intelligence due to the biases presented that McLuhan outlines: cultural bias and the unincorporation of other forms of intelligences: tactile and aural as the other two identified. This reminds me of Elton's idea of history being a through and through written craft.

McLuhan Reading

“The Medium is the Message” p. 151-161 Essential McLuhan. ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. House of Anansi Press, 1995.

This book is available in print and as an ebook. You will find a link through the Library's catalogue. Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing it.

Library of Congress Archiving Twitter

There can only be value added to a researcher's wide range of evidence based material to him/her by having Twitter donate its public tweets to the Library of Congress since its inception. However, the challenge will come when answering the question what use this will have and how messages can be accessed easily and in a manageable and usable way for an end research project. Computer search engine programs have a role in this. As for insights into human life and behaviour, businesses, politicians, and various groups "patrol" Twitter to see what sort of messages are being published concerning their organization. Individuals can now be hired as social media workers with regard to this. To the extent that humanity responds via Twitter to various regional, national, and global events offers hints into the collective thoughts of a group. In response to culture, Twitter is a bank of reaction to political decisions, everyday life, and what the weather is like. The development of Twitter and the limitations of 140 characters in a message may have something to say about online literacies.

First Post of the Year

For your first posting of the year, I would like you to comment briefly some thoughts on the Library of Congress archiving twitter.

For more information about that see LoC's news release:

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-081.html

See also this short article in the Scientific American about analyzing twitter (login required):

http://moxy.eclibrary.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=62900486&site=ehost-live

McLuhan Reading

I am not quite sure what to make of the reading. I liked some of the interesting facts regarding Napoleon's fear of newspapers, or the "money medium" in 17thC Japan. But I got the feeling that this chapter was too broad for its own good. One thought I had: According to McLuhan, the medium became the message is the electronic age. So, before the lightbulb existed, people believed that the "content" was the message. Well, as I read that paragraph, I imagined a Medieval church service. I wonder if the people is the pews believed that the content was the message, or whatever the priest talking about, or if God himself was the medium. A neat relationship, no? If "the medium is the message", how does that apply to religion.

The Medium is the Message

Like everyone else, I found the McLuhan reading extremely difficult to get through. I found the commentary on Cubism, however, to be quite interesting. In Cubism, the chapter's thesis is clearly spelled out: the painting itself "means" nothing other than the fact that it is a human-made construction. Using Braque's "Woman with a Guitar" as an example, the painting, though on one level an image of a woman with a guitar, is in no way life-like; no one will look at Braque's work and immediately say that it means to say anything about women or guitars. Rather, a Cubist painting is a commentary on the medium itself-- on the absurdity of attempting to recreate a real scene with paint on a flat canvas. The logic behind a work of Cubism, thus, is echoed in the very arguments Evans was attempting to defend the discipline of history against.

-Ian

The Medium is the Message Response

This article was quite the read. It seemed very fragmented to me, and had a lot of passing remarks about random figures, such as, Louis Pasteur - the man who first discovered germs. I had to search around a second time to try and decipher any main thread of thought. However, there were many very interesting remarks that he made.

One of the most interesting, yet obscure, insights that he brought up was focused on the I.Q.s of the British politicians in the 1930s. On page 158, McLuhan is citing to a situation written in a review by C.P. Snow of A.L. Rowse's book Appeasement. Rowse asks "Their I.Q.’s were much higher than usual among political bosses. Why were they such a disaster?" Snow's response to this quandry was, “They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear.” McLuhan synthesis of these two points that "Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the message of Hitler." This is a very short paragraph of his work, and had me very confused at the end of reading it. I know he is talking about the cultural bias in I.Q. test and they are not accurate because they are only meant to test people who are visual learners as opposed to the "ear man and the tactile man"(Auditory and Kinesthetic learners). There is also a point where McLuhan claims that literacy is a technology in our society and that it is universally uniform in all levels of government, education, politics, and social life, and doesn't differentiate it self for those outside the norm, which has lead to major problems for people who find themselves on the fringe of the status quo.
This still leaves me with two questions.

1. Is McLuhan inferring that since literacy is a technology/ medium would I.Q. test be its content?
2. Since I.Q. tests are flawed in their execution, should their results be deemed false/ inaccurate, and the test either be eliminated or revamped to be less visual and more balanced to accommodate different learning styles.