Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Blog 4
The quote by Marshall Mcluhan "the medium is the message" makes much more sense to me now after the last class because of the demonstrations with the waveforms and videos. I never really thought about how one sees information as giving a meaning. Then the little demonstration given in class with the wave forms and the videos made things click more in my head. By telling us what each song meant to Dr. Edwards we were not able to understand what the songs were or sounded like the way he did. Then we were shown the songs waveforms which with the previous information gave us a little more meaning behind what they make sound like. Finally by having us listen to the songs themselves were we able to understand why the waveforms looked the way they did and also why they meant what they did to Dr. Edwards. This showed that even though we saw the same thing in two forms (the waveform and listening to it) each provided us with a different meaning of the information. The first only allowed us to guess on how the songs may sound while the other gave us how they sound, the beats, the words in the songs and much more. Yet both in a certain way had the same information even if all that was missing was that the waveform was not in the greatest detail for us or a program to analyze. Had we heard the songs in Audacity some may have known what they were. Though the video of the second song (gangnam style) provided us with even more information than just the music could. We could have not gotten the same meaning from the sound alone. This is definitely a way that the quote "the medium is the message" has been proven correct.
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I was not there for that example of the the two songs but I am a believer in Mcluhan's quote, "The medium is the message." Like I have mentioned in my blog the experience is just as or even more important than outcome.
ReplyDeleteAs I see the world moving on to a technology heavy society, I have no idea how it will change us. I always hear and bring up the difference between the book and the e-book. You get a total different experience when you read from an actual book compared to the flat screen of a tablet. Not only that but the long term effect of staring at a screen could potentially be harmful.
I agree that the example used in class was very effective in demonstrating the concept introduced by Mcluhan. From my perspective, however, Mcluhan's quote ("the medium is the message") is a bit of an oversimplification. When Dr. Edwards changed the medium, I don't think the message itself changed, but rather the clarity of the message improved. When we actually got to hear the audio of the songs, the same information contained in the waveforms was being presented, but in a more effective way.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly with the basic concept presented by Mcluhan, however, which is that the usage of different mediums to present the same information can result in different, unique ways of presenting the information. This is an important piece of information and can be applicable to many professions, because many jobs require you to make an argument or present information. You need to know which medium is the most effective one to use to present your information.