What is Media?

            Media are the channels through which connections are made. They can come in all forms and express all kinds of ideas. They are channels through which the creator sends his or her message to the receiver. Media are the ways through which human beings have formed connections to reach each other. Media are books, games, movies, and so much more. Media all contain messages and are messages in themselves. I definitely agree with McLuhan that the medium is important, but I do not believe that the medium is the complete message. Rather, a balance of content and the medium itself is what defines media.

Marshal McLuhan argues that “the medium is the message” because the medium itself is more important than the content it carries. He believes that content is secondary to the actual media itself because media carry all the content within themselves. I do not agree with his idea that “the effect of a (medium) is not related to (its) content” (McLuhan 18) because content definitely adds to the media. Neither the media itself nor the content can stand alone and thus depend on each other to create a message to the receiver. While McLuhan believes that all the necessary content is embedded in media, I believe that although media have their own content, additional messages are also necessary. For example, while McLuhan believes that a computer is the complete message, I would not dismiss all the computer applications as completely vital to the medium.   

Our current mainstream understanding of media is those who cover the news and special events. We say things like “the riot was so outrageous that got media attention” because we see media as those who bring the world to us in a neat package. Whether in a television news report, a video of an event, or a newspaper article, the media to us is what connects us to the events that occur all throughout the world. I do not agree with this simplified mainstream definition of media.

My definition of media is very similar to McLuhan’s in the sense that I believe that media are messages in themselves.  However, I do not think the media contains the full message. To be more specific, I think that media are not things that occur naturally in the world. Trees in the Amazon are not media because there were no planters to give it a meaning. Media are things that have content and are content themselves. There needs to be someone to add messages to the medium by creating the medium or adding additional content to it in order for it to be media. Buildings, even though they may not seem to be media at first, are. They encompass the owner’s desires, the architect’s designs, and the construction worker’s labor. The buildings may not express an explicit message but the content is there, within the building. Contrary to McLuhan’s belief, if a family moved into the building, it adds content to the building and thus, affects the building’s job as a medium. Added content (family) is just as important as the embedded content (the message of the building).

You cannot separate the building from the creators, just as you cannot separate the idea of yourself and your home as an entity. We build for a reason. Even after the building is constructed, the reason does not disappear. It is, in fact, the core essence for why the building stands. There are different forms of media, such as electric media, paper media, sound media, and so on. However, they are still media.

Citations

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium Is the Message." Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man,. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. 3-47. Print.