The Medium is the Message

Currently I am enrolled in COM 101 Media and Society. In this class we reviewed an idea where the medium is the message. This is the idea that in itself the message’s content can be affected by the medium of which it is transmitted.   I think what Maria Popova has to say embodies this idea.  When she talks about text and how as a medium conveying information, it is linked to the essence of what the text is conveying. If you think about it all forms of media have an effect on the information they are conveying. For example, let’s compare a newspaper to a television broadcast of the news. Typically a newspaper contains long articles going into depth about what the “news” is. As you sit down and read you glean a lot of the information regarding the event. A television broadcast on the other hand is very fast paced and often gives the viewer a quick report of what the news is. Both may cover the same story but what a reader/viewer takes away from either is different. As Maria Popova was talking about Twitter, it was important she mentioned that the medium is the message. Nowadays, most of the news I get is from Twitter. This is just the era we live in. Twitter’s capability of being instantaneous is a huge advantage over other news sources. But at the same time both reliability and lack of information regarding the information is present as well. Because of this receiving news from Twitter is very different from receiving news from other forms of news distribution. Hence the fact that the message is the medium.