What do you guys think of McLuhan's phrase "the Medium

so he denies discourse? that's bullshit.

>>7679047

An example that he gives is that telephones as a whole affect the way the world functions very much, but what you in particular say on the phone affects very little.

>>7679051
Wouldn't the telephone as a medium only consist of the sum of all things said over the telephone, like the messages that are conveyed through the media are what give those media their importance?

>>7679058
The telephone as a medium being the potential to communicate with anyone in the world at any time at a very rapid pace.

That is just an example he gave, though it's kind of dated now. He argued that the way media works evolves as new media comes out, but ultimately the platform of the media is more important that what is posted there.

I was thinking about applying this philosophy to 4chan as a whole. The shitposts and memes posted 404 after X amount of time, but the ability for us to communicate anonymously with people all around the world is pretty spectacular, I think.

>>7679051
that's really optimistic in my opinion.
i studied cultural studies a little in my university, adorno and horkheimer have strong antithesis to this, which suggests that mass culture is produced and distributed to people and it is done through the use of discourse.
just watch a little tv, the first thing you'll see the patriarchal discourse. women with kids at home etc. saying this is not significant and it doesn't have any affect on culture or anything seems absurd to me.

>>7679077
>affect
effect*

>>7679077
Those are interesting points. I had never heard of those theorists. I'm writing a paper on my interaction with media and I'm talking about how "the medium is the message" with 4chan, and how 4chan kind of averts the gaze of the "panopticon" (societal influences that cause us to act certain ways because of a fear of scrutiny by "big brother" or our peers that is inherent on other forms of social media)

>>7679091
you can look up the term carnivalesque then. it's close to what you are looking for, which is limited subversion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivalesque#Bakhtin.27s_Four_Categories

>>7679091
4chan enacts its own method of social discourse and outgroup othering via memes (pleb/patrician, normie, reddit, tumblr/sjw), just as bad as a panopticon; here the idiots don't think they're being idiots when they spout memes ironically or shitpost.

>>7679073
I would say that we are still dealing with the telephone albeit in a much more elaborated form.

>/lit/ is open on my laptop, /b/ is open on my phone, my books are all shut and in the corner of my bed

>>7679102
I'm not sure I entirely understand.

Anons, it's not that he is denying discourse or denying the role of specific messages, just that his work in particular focus on something else that is often neglected, which is the role the medium has in the way it is presented to us.

That includes technology, as you said, how telephones changed the world, or how the tv changed the way a family sits around in a room and now the computer, celphones etc.

But also on a myriad of other subtle levels, how a talk show is organized, how the ad breaks are scattered through tv programming, how a theater made into an audience/stage situation is different from a street theater, or how a teacher can make people sit in a circle, alone or in groups, using the blackboard or not, or how a museum presents its pieces, whether it has guards or not, etc. All of those formats, in spite of what message they sent us, are also saying something themselves.

He believes that to understand the difference in the way these messages are sent to us is crucial. We can still talk about the messages, but we must not forget the way it travels, where it comes from, how it goes, why it reaches and to what effect.

>>7679153
Kind of like how Foucault discusses the structure of institutions, rather than taking for granted the way functions are ascribed to those institutions...i like it...what book is this from?

>>7679203
Yes, like Foucault talks about the structures, like Zizek talking of ideology through toilets, how Lacan and Freud focused on the use of language... They are all paying attention to more than what it is done as to how they are done (and how the two are linked).

I'll be honest with you, I've only read academic papers on McLuhan. But it is supposedly in Understanding Media.

I think his whole fallacy is wrong.

>>7679231
>>7679231
Thanks. Have you ever read anything about psychogeography? The impact of city planning on the human/social structure? It's bretty gud

>>7679239
I think your whole sentence is redundant

>>7679106
The outgrouping social discourse is wholly unique I believe though

Take /r9k/ as an example
They may hate a "normie" but they can't stop one from posting on their board no matter how hard they try
/lit/ can't stop someone who likes john green from posting and you have trouble drowning them out
/pol/ can't stop a feminist queer half black marxist from posting

It's a unique sort of discourse here

>>7679203
Read Understanding Media if you want something more thorough and academic. Read The Medium is the Massage if you want something playful and succinct.

McLuhan would later truncate MM (medium is the message) into f/g for Figure/Ground
example
This comment is figure on the ground of that which makes up the communication networks known as Internet, the.
Discourse is a medium, it'd the figure on the ground of language.
f/g timeline: instinct>gesture>[ff thousands of units of time, you pick] conscious thought>word sound>[ff] cave painting/marking>rock script>etc(glyphs)>papyrus>manuscript>Gutenberg>1844(telegraph/wirelessness)>Tesla>The Inevitable Now

Words are figure on the ground of thought, thought is figure on the ground of consciousness, consciousness is figure on the ground of unconsciousness, with each new permutation of f/g being a new technological development full of the previous dominant tech's content.

So again, what you express couldn't matter less. If the room you're in right now was freezing as opposed to room temperature, it would dramatically effect your expression.

If you don't agree and it's 8chsn do it's kind of your duty no to, think of this

The actual Rosetta Stone is a tax law ledger, yet, without it we'd never understand Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Reread the Rosetta example a few times between the two modes of anger and apathy and you'll eventually agree (it's true, cuz it rhymez)

>>7679041
With the risk of sounding silly because I haven't read McLuhan so I might fuck up terminology, I think the phrase is correct. In television, we have ''reality tv'' which has nothing to do with reality, yet it's perceived as real through the mediums name alone. The same would go for the news and its reliability. It's mostly dependent on the source, the program, the newspaper, which are all promoted and credited/discredited through other media.

All this is obviously skipping the fact that the medium heavily determines the message, and someone out there will quote the old presidential debate done on both radio and tv to prove this.

Basically, I don't think there has to be a message to sustain culture at all, there just needs to be something to tell you there is a message, to dangle it in front of you, and that's the medium.

the medium is the message
if this was written rather than typed the message would be changed slightly,
do we really need to make it more complicated?

the effects of the message are dependent on the medium

here, understand it all now
https://soundcloud.com/constant_context/marshall-mcluhan-interview-jun

how the fuck is this the first time you're encountering all this i thought you all went to college

jesus christ this is freshman year stuff

>>7679077

>the first thing you'll see the patriarchal discourse. women with kids at home etc

humans are mammals.
I'm pretty sure most mammal females including humans take care of their offspring.

So it may have nothing to do with culture but biology.

>>7679041
That's why literature is important. Words - language itself - they are pure form.

>>7679041
The fact that a new medium appears and is used, he thinks, is more significant to humanity than what grandmas are gossiping over it with - on average sure but those two perspectives are not really comparable are they... what am I meant to do with this information anyway? get comfortable with, or be wary of, archetypal messages to expect from the medium until I can't take it anymore and look for others?

>>7681409
How is literature purer than e.g. speech? I don't think literature is particularly pure.

>>7679257
I was just making an Annie Hall joke.

>>7680046
This is interesting but well-trodden territory (as demonstrated in part by >>7679231 ). What are some thinkers whose work deals with the implication that, in the present era, we have a critical mass of people in society who can use/understand words.

i.e. The figure/ground concept can and must be adequately explained through words, which implies that, pre-words (when "thought as a figure on the ground of consciuosness" is the preeminent technology) such a thing was unthinkable. What then happens at the next level of technology?

>>7681942
>What are some thinkers whose work deals with the implication that, in the present era, we have a critical mass of people in society who can use/understand words
That was meant to be written as a question. What are some other thinkers/philosophers/etc who deal in this territory?

>>7679243
Yi fu tuan is good for that

>>7681350
/lit/ is full of lying kids. I''ve been coming here since 2007 once every six months to check how it's going and the threads are all the same. I guess people move on with their lives, but new kids are discovering 4chan everyday. Try to bring something less entry level and get your ticket to page 11.