Even though he wrote it in 1964, Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that “the medium is the message” has resonated with me since I first encountered it in Understanding Media.[1] As a literary scholar, my concern was rarely about medium and always about the content. In the 1990s, when I spent most of my student days in graduate school, the Internet was a nascent realm full of possibilities if not of content. Our devices were still beige boxes on desks and cell phones were just starting to gain popularity. While I sometimes concerned myself with genre, most of my time was spent concentrating on the content of study, not its container. The digital slowly changed all of that.
Only when I began teaching new media did I start to consider another level of significance. McLuhan’s proclamation made me slowly realize that the container shapes our relationship to that which it contains, and it’s this relationship that shapes our reality more than the ideas it contains. Whoa, that’s quite the revelation for the newly-minted Ph.D. in literature. It’s almost a heresy.
Our evolving relationship with the media of the digital world make McLuhan’s observation even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it. While I still approach literary studies and literary criticism in traditional analytical and interpretative ways, I am now aware of the importance of considering medium as an equal layer of significance that is deserving of our critical attention.
A question, then, that has preoccupied me in another facet of my professional life is: how does medium affect written communication? As a corollary, do we experience text the same way on a screen as we do on paper? If not, we should consider — as writers in digital media — just what the most effective ways of writing are when it’s meant to be read on the screen. That’s what Writing.Digital is all about: starting with a specific medium and addressing the best strategies for writing in that medium.
Citations & Notes
- ↑ McLuhan 2003, p. 203.
Bibliography
Purchases made through the links below go to support this work. I appreciate your support.
- Applen, J. D. (2013). Writing for the Web: Composing, Coding, and Constructing Web Sites. New York: Routledge. p. 188.
- Barr, Chris (2010). The Yahoo! Style Guide. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.
- Carroll, Brian (2017). Writing and Editing for Digital Media. New York: Routledge.
- McLuhan, Marshall (2003) [1964]. "The Medium Is the Message". In Wardrip-Fruin, Noah; Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. Cambridge: The MIT Press. pp. 203–209.
- Nielson, Jakob (October 1, 1997). "How Users Read on the Web". Nielson Norman Group. Retrieved 2018-12-26.
| June 30, 2019 | Version: Beta 0.1 |
