by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task:
> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.
The gem of this article is: "Messages that are difficult to process are less compelling."
The best thing we can do when communicating is make it easy -- in both message and medium (with apologies to McLuhan) -- for the folks we want to consume it to consume it.
I always short-circuit McLuhan, 'the medium is the message' at its logical extreme really means that... the message is McLuhan, the concerted pr campaign described in this article would back this up.
You were right the first time. "The medium is the message" was one of the pithy statements from Understanding Media (1964) that made McLuhan's name. The other variants of the phrase are all just plays on the first.
>One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability.
Don't forget the usefulness of email when you need the ability to reference past conversations. For some people, a faulty memory is a finely honed art.
>>he tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others. Indeed, since our thoughts are the result of our individual sensory experience, speech is an "outering" of our senses - we could consider it as a form of reversing senses - whereas usually our senses bring the world into our minds, speech takes our sensorially-shaped minds out to the world. But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium - this extension of our body or senses or mind - is anything from which a change emerges. And since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.
I've read a book by Niel Postman where he points out that the medium your working in changes how you craft a message. I believe he was right in stating that a text-based medium promotes reasoning to a greater degree.
I think Marshall McLuhan's views on this are worth revisiting as well, though he's currently a bit out of favor among media-studies and communications-studies folks. He's admittedly a bit extreme in parts (he seems to sometimes really believe that the "medium is the message"), but there's a lot of good stuff in Laws of Media on how different technical choices for representing and conveying information will structure and influence the information that's conveyed, as opposed to being mere implementation details.
Communication theory is the medium constrains the possible messages. Further, McLuhan, Postman, others are saying various mediums have their own intrinsic dominate properties, character, which crowd out most other messages. TV gave us the sound bite. Usenet gave us trolls. Twitter gave us Trump. Facebook gave us "fake news" (aka gossip posing as truth).
Overall interesting ideas, but I think he did a disservice to this one.
> 47. The Medium Is the Message: We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example, the Internet’s impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that’s said on the Internet.
The concept here is that the character of the medium defines the types of ideas that can be transmitted through it. An example is how writing promotes logical and structures ideas, where television invokes emotion.
EDIT: a relevant example is comparing HN and fb. The are both internet-based and have high-speed responses. However, HK is text based and all ideas must be written in a way that is clear to the reader. FB has text, but also has the like/heart/laugh/hate button. I think this encourages "a response", whether you can articulate it or not. Also fb has images. Memes can be used, which are quite ambiguous and not a structured, logical statement. The different environments are a consequence of the rules that define the medium.
> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.
(a tangent, but perhaps interesting)
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