Week in Review, Semester in Summary

I’m still not sure I’m sold on the idea of “the media is the message.” McLuhan’s words have been tossed about in various office places, as well as the ad department of my undergraduate institution, where it was quoted out of context. (In the office, McLuhan’s words were frequently misused to justify adopting a new technology in a half-hearted fashion. As though simply mentioning it in the strategic plan was going to be enough for the client.) I found, though, that reading the oft-quoted phrase, in context, still didn’t convince me of McLuhan’s argument.

I do agree with Anne’s statement in the overview about the criticisms of McLuhan. It does seem that he chooses to ignore social and cultural contexts in favor of incorporating everything into his concept of “media.” Therefore, everything is fair game for his judgments, and he doesn’t need to rely on anyone else’s theories to qualify, support or explain other factors at play. I’m not sure whether I find that stance to be incredibly useful, personally. I find that I rely heavily on context to assess a situation. Who sees a message, how might it affect them, and who sent the message and why are important variables.

However, I appreciate the ideas that many of the authors in the CTMS collection present, and I believe I’ll be able to reference them in other contexts. John Durham Peters’ summary of “Mass Media” defines the rhetorical stances assumed by using various forms of media. Bruce Clarke offers summary of some communication theory as well as references some theoretical philosophy that is often applied to communicative acts. I think the explorations of these aspects of media in historic, social or cultural contexts and the linguistic perspectives will be very useful. Further, the classics of the discipline that we have read, including Barthes, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer and McLuhan are useful in establishing a theoretical base, and perhaps, pointing toward the next steps.

It seems that there isn’t so much a formal “canon” of works for media studies, outside of a handful of the classics, some of which we’ve read here, and some of which I’ve encountered in professional writing courses.  I’m curious to see what theories are going to be relevant, and how those might be able to be applied to situations in which media are involved.