My Thoughts -CENSORED-

Marshal McLuhan suggests that the “medium is the message” and goes on further to suggests that as a new medium is developed it makes the predecessor almost cliché.

Erika made a post in regards to the “content” and the source of the original content. I would suggest that the original “content” of any medium is the very thought that produced it. For effect I’ll walk a chain here, backwards, to see if we can elucidate this fact further.

When we watch a movie we are experiencing a story. The predecessor to this piece of motion cinema is a screenplay and in many cases a screenplay is an adaption of a book. If writing is the result of speech then this book is a representation of the author’s words in written form to be mass produced. Beyond that the author’s words are most certainly a product of the author’s thoughts and there we must end.

So it’s fairly easy to see this linking of the content back to the origin. I say origin but there is doubtless a chain of reasoning that goes well beyond thoughts but that is likely not in the scope of this class.

Now we should probably take a look at communication beyond the strict application to media. To start I’ll ask a question; why do we speak?

We speak so that we can express the thoughts and ideas that we have, the feeling that we are experiencing that and entirely internal. That speech allows us to share these thoughts and ideas with one another and cooperatively come to new ideas and conclusion or simply reaffirm the ones we already possessed. This speech led to oral communities that shared history and knowledge with one another through an oral tradition.

Now we must ask; why do we read and write?

We read and write so that we can have a record of all the knowledge and history that we’ve accumulated over the years. This is a uniquely human idea that has led to the current intellectual state of mankind. Instead of having to retell a story over and over throughout the years we merely have to look it up in a book.

So, let me pose another question. Do you say everything that you think and feel? Do you write exactly how you would speak if the person were there to hear you?

This is an idea that I think Leslie was confronting in her post. As the message is filtered through these various different types of media it begins to lose all semblance of itself and soon the message is entirely lost in the medium.

Censorship and the Loss of Meaning

We don’t say everything in our thoughts because this is personal and secure; a place where we can express our ‘true’ selves freely. If our thoughts were open for the perusal of everyone we’d likely be embarrassed if not ashamed so we school ourselves to speak only what needs to be spoken to get an idea across and we often organize it to be acceptable to our audience. In effect we censor ourselves and in this translation we lose part of the original meaning.

The same idea applies to writing. As we write we have to consider that our audience is larger than a single individual and might even reach the eyes and ears of people to whom we’ve never met and have no conception of how they may receive our message. Again we censor our meaning even further.

Beyond writing the cycle continues. When a book is published on a large scale there are editor that make revisions or even strip out sections of the material to condense it into a more manageable quantity. Then only certain books are selected to become movies or television drama and the screenwriters further alter and strip the work so that it can fit into a slot of time, usually no more than two hours.

While this movie is widely distributed and seen by audiences that might not have even considered the material in its written form it is easy to see that the ideas have been put through a machine that have altered it in such a way as to change the message entirely.

It is due to this that I see a disconnection with people of our modern culture. This digital media might be extending our nervous system to new and previously unimaginable extremes but in the process it’s disconnection us from our way of experiencing the world. With our nervous system stretched to unbelievable measures we lose touch with ourselves and become numb and hollow. Perhaps this is the numbness that McLuhan was sensing.

It is no wonder then that in the Buddhist belief the way to Zen can only be sought with “wordless transmission”. The Buddhists believe that thought loses its purity once it is transformed into words and so the legacy from master to disciple is passed through this wordless transmission.

Because of this I cannot see how the advance of new mediums makes old mediums obsolete and cliché. A story read from a book will never have the same effect as one told in the open night air cast in the glow of firelight. This too is why expressions of love through written words alone will never match the power of those spoken from the lips.