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ISSN 1913-6005 STUDYING MEDIA AS MEDIA
创建日期：2024-06-08 14:53:25
所属分类：哲学Philosophy
STUDYING MEDIA AS MEDIA
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ISSN 1913-6005
STUDYING MEDIA AS MEDIALANCE STRATE
Let me begin with a story about a professor at my university. This professor
was a senior faculty member and an accomplished scholar, and he had a “no
nonsense” approach to education. He regularly taught a large, impersonal
lecture course. It was a required course, which meant that the professor was free
to make it as difficult and demanding as he liked. And he relished the reputation
he gained for his strict and severe grading. His final examinations were
especially tough, and at the beginning of the test, the professor would warn his
students that they must stop writing when he announces that the test is over.
Otherwise, they will be given a failing grade for the final, and fail the course.
One semester, one of his students ignored this warning, and continued to
work on his essay after the professor announced that time had run out. All of
the other students obediently put down their pens, and dropped their
examination booklets in a great pile on the desk at the front of the room. As the
rest of the students walked out of the room, the one student finished writing,
and walked to the front of the class with his booklet. The professor looked at
him sternly, and told him that he would not accept his exam, and that the
student would receive a failing grade. The student looked the professor squarely
in the eye and said: “Do you know who I am?” The professor responded: “No I
do not, and frankly I couldn’t care less!” The student then said “Good!” and
stuck his final into the middle of the pile of booklets, and ran away.
Now, I must confess to you that this is not a true story. I took it from a
book of urban legends written by the American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand
(1986). Actually, Brunvand refers to this particular story as one of the legends
of academe, but the important point is that it is truly a legend, a story passed on
and preserved by word of mouth. It is told on many different college campuses,
but always told as a true story that happened right here, at our school, at some
time in the recent past. Nowadays, when so much of our attention is captured
by our electronic technologies and digital communications, it is both important
and humbling to recall that speech is still the foundation of human culture, and
that oral traditions have yet to be extinguished altogether.
MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 128
tradition of orally composed epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey, Gilgamesh,
Beowulf, the Elder Edda, or the Kalevala. We have no nonliterate singers of
tales whose bardic performances maintain cultural continuity from generation
to generation. We do not depend on collective memory alone for the
preservation of knowledge. And poetry, proverbs, and other such oral media no
longer serve as our dominant mode of public communication.
The legend of the professor and student originates as an oral form of
communication, but its content is very much derived from literate culture. The
setting of the school represents the institutionalization of literacy, and the
university symbolizes literacy in its highest form. The professor is an
embodiment of the literate mindset, demanding that his students proceed by the
book, and that his instructions be followed to the letter. In other words, his
rigidity mirrors the fixity of the written word, in contrast to the flexibility and
multiformity of oral traditions. Also, the professor is an elitist, treating his
students as if they were beneath contempt. The word “elite” comes from the
same root as “literacy,” both referring to the distinction between the lettered
and the unlettered. And, of course, the legend revolves around an examination,
where the main activity is writing, and it is the student’s refusal to stop writing
that gets him into trouble.
The student’s ultimate triumph is derived from the fact that the
examination booklets are mass produced products, each one identical to the
other, insuring his anonymity. They are, in fact, print media, a point we tend to
overlook because most of what is printed does not consist of words, or pictures,
but of straight lines to guide our handwriting. In one of my own classes, I use a
piece of ruled paper as a test for my students. I show them the paper and ask
them to write down what they see. Some students write that it is a blank piece
of paper. To them I say that they need to shed their preconceptions and use their
powers of observation. Other students write that it is lined paper, sometimes
also noting the color of the lines and the paper. To them I say that they are
using their senses, but need to think more about the meaning of what they see.
And finally, a few students will say that they see lines printed on paper, or even
that they see a print medium. And to them I say that you are ready to study
media, that is, to study media as media.
The professor in our legend does not understand media as media. He is
fully immersed in literate culture, and dismisses alternatives, or cannot imagine
them in the first place. The student, on the other hand, is the central figure in an
oral narrative, and very much resembles the trickster character of oral myth and
legend, such as the Native American Coyote god, the ancient Greek Titan
Prometheus, or the Norse pantheon’s Loki.
MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 129
with these oral heroes (Strate, 1994, 1995, 2008), but at the same time, he is
literate enough to pursue higher education. And given the fact that this is a
contemporary legend, I think it safe to assume that the student is in fact
postliterate, a product of the electronic media environment. Much like the
computer hacker, he steps outside of the system, uncovers its code, and alters it
to his own benefit. The literate culture that the school manifests is an invisible
environment to the professor. But literate culture’s structure, and its flaws,
stand exposed to the students of the electronic era.
The student is the hero of the legend, and the story is told so as to foster
our sympathy for him. Of course, those of us who are educators may feel guilty
for taking sides against our colleague, the professor. But I want to suggest to
you that it is in fact appropriate for us to identify with the student. As students
ourselves, we need to use our powers of observation to reveal our otherwise
invisible media environments. And as scholars, we need to use our powers of
understanding to make meaning out of our media environments and their
effects. After all, consider just some of the fields of study that have arisen in
response to innovations in communication technology.
Alphabetic writing, by virtue of its ability to make speech visible, gave
rise to the discipline of rhetoric in ancient times, and to the study of language
and poetics, which was also known as grammar; the alphabet also set the stage
for what was known as dialectics, or logic, as codified by Aristotle. Rhetoric,
grammar, and logic together became known as the trivium, the basis of the
Medieval university curriculum, and what became known as the liberal arts. In
the nineteenth century, innovations such as the steam-powered printing press
and telegraphy led to both the modern newspaper and also to journalism as an
academic pursuit, while the addition of the motion picture gave birth to film
theory and cinema studies. The introduction of broadcasting in the form of
radio, following on the heels of mass circulation newspapers, magazines, as
well as the movies, resulted in the study of mass communication. The invention
of photography, film, and sound recording suggested the studies of
interpersonal communication and nonverbal communication. Sound recording
technology was also instrumental to the discovery of primary oral cultures and
the beginning of orality-literacy studies (Lord, 1960; Ong, 1982; Parry, 1971).
Electricity and electric devices, especially the electric media of communication,
were essential to the development of technology studies (Carey, 1989, 1997),
information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1969;
Wiener, 1950). In many ways, the modern field of communication established
in the aftermath of World War II went hand-in-hand with the development of
television, information technology, and the digital computer (Shannon &
Weaver, 1949; Wiener, 1950).
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 130
These very same media and technologies had much to do with the
sudden interest in studying language and symbols that is characteristic of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which includes the new fields of
linguistics and semiotics, general semantics, and of course media ecology, the
intellectual tradition with which I am associated. In this essay, my focus will be
on Marshall McLuhan, but I want to make it clear that media ecology is more
than “McLuhanism.” Its roots can be traced to the studies of technology
produced by Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and Peter Drucker; the research on
oral tradition, writing systems, and typography associated with Eric Havelock,
Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Denise Schmandt-Besserat, as well as Lucien
Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin, and Elizabeth Eisenstein; the studies of media and
culture of Harold Innis, Edward T. Hall, Edmund Carpenter, and James Carey;
and the investigations into symbolic form carried out by Alfred Korzybski,
Suzanne Langer, Dorothy Lee, and Neil Postman (for an extended review of the
literature in the field of media ecology, see Strate, 2006; see also Lum, 2006).
Media ecology is the study of media as media, which follows from
McLuhan’s (1964) famous maxim, “the medium is the message” (p. 7). “The
medium is the message” is McLuhan’s wake-up call to individuals like the
professor who, like most people, tend to ignore the medium and only pay
attention to content. In effect, McLuhan was trying to say: “it’s the medium,
stupid!” McLuhan’s goal was the liberation of the human mind and spirit from
its subjugation to symbol systems, media, and technologies. This can only
begin with a call to pay attention to the medium, because it is the medium that
has the greatest impact on human affairs, not the specific messages we send or
receive. It is the symbolic form that is most significant, not the content. It is the
technology that matters the most, its nature and its structure, and not our
intentions. It is the materials that we work with, and the methods we use to
work with them, that have the most to do with the final outcome of our labors.
Of course, there are some who disagree with this point of view. For
example, in the United States there is the National Rifle Association, a pressure
group that opposes all attempts at gun control. Their slogan is “guns don’t kill
people, people do.” If you disagree with this argument, and believe that there is
greater potential for violence with firearms than without them, then you believe
that the medium is the message. The idea has been expressed in any number of
ways. It is inherent in Henry David Thoreau’s (1893/1980) observation on the
building of the railroads: “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (p.
67). The idea is also implied in Mark Twain’s wonderful remark that when you
have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail (quoted in Eastham,
1990, p. 17).
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 131
The medium is the message because content cannot exist without a
medium. Words can take the form of speech, or writing, for example. Or they
can exist as internalized speech within the mind, the product of nerve impulses
in the brain. But there must be some physical basis for them in matter or
energy. And the different forms that they take determine what their meaning
and impact will be. The words we think to ourselves seem different when we
utter them out loud. The words we write down take on a permanence, distance,
and impersonal quality in comparison to speech.
Along the same lines, information does not exist in a vacuum. It can be
found riding radiowaves or the electric current running through wires, or stored
in magnetic or optical form. Or information can be found in the sequences of
chemicals that make up strands of DNA and RNA. The code and the mode of
information that is used will determine who has access to the data and who
controls its dissemination, how much information will be distributed, how fast
it will be transmitted, how far it will travel, how long the information will be
available, and the form in which it will be displayed. As these variables change,
so does the message that is being communicated.
Artists have long understood that the medium is the message, that the
same subject will yield an entirely different effect if the image is rendered in oil
paint or watercolors, or sketched in charcoal. Sculptors likewise know that the
decision whether to chisel a bust out of stone, carve it from wood, or mold it in
clay will have a major impact on the end product. And musicians will tell you
that when the same melody is played on violin, trumpet, and xylophone, you
have three different pieces of music.
The medium is the message as well because the medium precedes the
message. Before we produce the finished product, we must first have the raw
materials we need, and the means to shape them. Before we can encode a
message, we must first have the code with which to construct it. And before we
learn how to talk, we first must babble. The sounds that babies make, goo-goo,
ga-ga, and the like, are the sounds of the medium of speech without the
linguistic content. First we learn how to recognize and make the significant
sounds of our language, and only later do we learn how to make the significant
symbols, that is, spoken words.
McLuhan (1964) also argued that the medium is the message because
the content of a medium is, in a certain way, another medium. For example, the
medium of speech becomes the content of writing, the medium of writing
becomes the content of print, the medium of print becomes the content of
hypertext. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) refer to this process as
remediation. And they point out that the computer and computer networks
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 132
remediate just about every other medium in existence, turning written
documents, books, magazines and newspapers, paintings and photographs,
sound recordings and telephone conversations, as well as radio, movies, and
television, into content for websites and multimedia presentations. At the same
time, computer displays and interfaces are themselves remediated as content for
older media such as motion pictures and television. When one medium
becomes another medium’s content, it becomes the code, symbolic form, or
aesthetic style used to create specific messages.
McLuhan explained that another reason why the medium is the message
is because the user is the content. What he meant was that audiences and
readers must interpret the messages that they receive, process the sensory data
that they take in, make meaning out of their environments, the artifacts that
exist in them, and the events that occur within them. This coincides with such
approaches to the study of communication, media, and culture as reader
response theory, uses and gratifications research, ethnographic research of
audiences and consumers, and studies of the decoding process; it is also
consistent with contemporary research on the biology of perception and
cognitive science. The point here is that if the message is largely constructed on
the receiving end of communication, then its effect on us is limited. Therefore,
it is the medium and not the message that has the greatest influence on the user
and the audience. Put another way, it is the context that determines the content.
McLuhan’s critics have been fond of making the counter-statement that
the medium is not the message, to the point that this denial has become an
academic cliché. And of course, it misses McLuhan’s point entirely. We all
know that medium and message are separate categories. That is our starting
point, and dismissing McLuhan simply leaves us back at square one. The critics
seem to think that we are dealing with a mathematical equation, which says,
“let x equal medium, let y equal message, such that x equals y.” But “the
medium is the message” is a metaphor, not a math problem; it also is a
contradiction in terms, an oxymoron—Ray Gozzi, Jr. (1999) calls it an
oxymetaphor. Its purpose is to call our attention to the complex, dialectical
relationship between medium and message.
McLuhan’s critics have also taken him to task for denying the existence
of content altogether, which would certainly be an absurdity. In point of fact, he
was merely trying to put content in its place, a secondary role in relation to the
medium. Whatever the consequences of the messages we send, it is the media
we use that play the leading role in human affairs; it is our technologies that
shape us individually and collectively.
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 133
McLuhan’s emphasis on media effects has led some of his critics to
label his approach as technological determinism. Technological determinism is
a straw man used to caricature McLuhan as some sort of media Calvinist, and to
dismiss his arguments without serious consideration. After all, most people get
upset at the denial of free will, in theory as well as in practice. But McLuhan
never actually used the term, “determinism,” nor did he argue against human
agency. In his bestselling book, The Medium is the Massage, he wrote, “there is
absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what
is happening” (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967, p. 25). John Culkin (1967) summed up
McLuhan’s position with the quote, “we shape our tools and thereafter they
shape us” (p. 52), suggesting a transactional approach to media.
Free will does not mean freedom from limits, constraints, and outside
influences. As diffusion researcher Everett Rogers (2003) puts it, innovations
have consequences, and while some of the consequences may be desirable,
others may be undesirable. And while some consequences may be direct effects
of the introduction of a new technology, these in turn may lead to further
indirect effects. And while some consequences may be anticipated, there will
always be others that are unanticipated. Along the same lines, it may be true
that a good part of what we call reality is a social construction, but the
construction we end up with is not necessarily one that we intended to build.
Moreover, only an intellectual divorced from everyday life could forget that
construction begins with raw materials and the tools that shape them. Media are
the stuff with which we build our social realities.
Other critics complain that media ecology scholars like McLuhan,
Havelock, and Ong put forth a “Great Divide” theory, exaggerating the
difference between orality and literacy, for example. And it is true that they see
a great divide between orality and literacy. And a great divide between word
and image. And a great divide between the alphabet, on the one hand, and
pictographic and ideographic writing, on the other. And a great divide between
clay tablets as a medium for writing and papyrus. And a great divide between
parchment and paper. And a great divide between scribal copying and the
printing press. And a great divide between typography and the electronic media.
And now a great divide between virtuality and reality. I could continue to add
to this list, but the point is that there are many divides, which suggests that no
single one of them is all that great after all.
The critics miss the point that media ecology scholars often work
dialectically, using contrasts to understand media. Additional examples would
include Mumford’s (1934) organic and mechanical ideologies, Innis’s (1951)
heavy and light media and space and time biases, and McLuhan’s (1964)
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 134
categories of hot and cool. Theorists such as Donald Theall (2001) and Daniel
Czitrom (1983) have described McLuhan’s method as a form of dialectics,
while Judith Stamps (1995) and Paul Grosswiler (1998) have traced the
parallels between McLuhan’s implicit dialectical system, and the explicit
dialectics of critical theorists. McLuhan (2006) himself rejected dialectics in the
classical sense, it should be noted, arguing that the emphasis on logic
originating with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was in conflict with approaches
that favor rhetoric and grammar, with which he was aligned. But the concepts
of the dialectician that Stamps and Grosswiler discuss represent a significant
movement towards McLuhan’s ideal of the grammarian. In general, media
ecology represents a less mature body of theory than critical theory (if media
ecology is to be considered theory at all), but also one that is more open-ended
and adaptable, and more concrete, less prone to the hardening of the categories,
as McLuhan was wont to say. Ultimately, dialectics is not an end-in-itself for
media ecology scholars, but rather, a step that brings us closer to a truly
ecological perspective.
Media ecology scholars also use broad categories like oral, scribal,
print, and electronic cultures. These are alternatives to divisions such as
agricultural, industrial, and information societies, based on the notion that it is
communication, not economics, that most influences social life. In this sense,
we would view the evolution of speech and language as intrinsically related to
the origin of the human species. The development of systems of writing from
various forms of notation is associated with the transition from tribal societies
to what has traditionally been called civilization, that is, the founding of cities
in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. The substitution of paper for
parchment and the printing revolution that began with Johannes Gutenberg are
tied to the shift from the Medieval period in Europe to modernity. And as
electronic and audiovisual media have been introduced over the course of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we recognize that we have entered a new
period of history, one that we have yet to understand, so that the best we can do
is to term it “postmodern.”
Each of these broadly defined historical periods can also be understood
as a basic type of media environment, that is, the oral, scribal, print, and
electronic media environments. But media ecology scholars also recognize that
any given society at any given time has its own unique media environment.
Whether we focus on the general or the specific, what is essential is to
understand that media are environments. It is more common to think of media
in terms of a pipeline or transportation, something that links or bridges two
points. Media ecology scholars have long been critical of the transportation
model, McLuhan (1995) arguing that we should replace transportation with
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MediaTropes Vol I (2008) Lance Strate 135
transformation, Tony Schwartz (1974) that we should use the concept of
resonance, James Carey (1989) that we substitute ritual, and Walter Ong
(1982) that we simply use human communication.
All of these possibilities have ecological connections, but the term in
question, “medium,” is also defined as “a substance that surrounds or pervades,
that goes between two points not by drawing a straight line between them, but
by drawing a circle around them.” For example, fish swim through the medium
of water, just as we move through the medium of air. Bacteria such as
acidophilus live in the medium of milk, which they transform into yogurt. And
we call that colony of bacteria a culture. In other words, as Neil Postman (2000)
has explained, cultures are formed within media, rather than media simply
being produced by cultures.
One of the dictionary definitions for the word “medium” is “an
environment,” and understanding media as environments is the antidote to
thinking of media in terms of cause and effect relations. A medium is not like a
billiard ball, producing its effects by striking another ball. Rather, it is more like
the table on which the game is played. Put another way, a medium is not an
actor, it is a stage on which human agents play their parts. As environments,
media do not determine our actions, but they define the range of possible
actions we can take, and facilitate certain actions while discouraging others.
Media function as environments, ecologies, and systems. Content is
what happens within the system, and it may or may not affect the system.
Technological innovation is a change that occurs to the system itself, and its
impact will be profound and far-reaching. And from a systems perspective, we
can understand that media do not cause certain effects in a linear manner, but
rather, particular forms of communication, consciousness, and culture emerge
out of particular media ecologies.
While McLuhan viewed media as environments, he is better known for
using the popular notion that technologies are extensions of our bodies and our
capabilities. But these two conceptions differ only in emphasis, not essence,
and McLuhan’s emphasis is on the human end of technology. In extending
ourselves, our technologies come between ourselves and our environment, and
thereby become our new environment. In shielding and protecting us from our
old environment, our media numb our bodies and our minds, which is why
McLuhan said that every extension is also an amputation. Or as Max Frisch
(1959) put it in his novel, Homo Faber, “technology is the art of never having
to experience the world” (p. 178).
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