Media vs. Content

I would agree with Erika’s concluding comment that content must be led by a medium and cannot stand alone because the medium has such a dramatic impact on how the content is perceived by those who experience it. One example of this notion could be to compare two mediums, a static painting of a landscape and a digital animation of a similar scene on a computer. The painting retains a certain aesthetic value that allows the viewer to follow brush strokes and understand the tedious manual processes used to create the landscape. The digital animation, on the other hand, may carry a sense of artificiality in its perfection because it was created using strict mathematical formulas and precise renderings on a computer program, and could send an entirely different message to the viewer with regards to process and content.

This idea can be justified by McLuhan’s quote, “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that introduces it into human affairs.” When computer animation first came into existence, it did not introduce an entirely new form of art, but was inspired by classic studio arts such as drawing and painting, flip book cartoons, and stop-start animation. Similar to McLuhan’s example of the railway and transportation, computer animation accelerated the possibilities of human creation in the visual arts by building upon what was discovered in the past, and allowing man to create enormous projects more rapidly than ever before. One man may perceive the content of an animation differently the man next to him, despite the fact that they are both looking at the same medium, and one must also take into consideration the creator’s intentions when producing a piece of media. Ultimately, I believe that content has a direct relationship with media and that McLuhan doesn’t give content enough credit for content’s prominence in digital media.