Blog#1: The Message Is Equal to Knowledge

After reading McLuhan's piece, The Medium Is the Message, there was some material that I was able comprehend clearly and other material that I was not so clear of understanding. The main idea that I got from McLuhan's work is that the message is embedded in the content of a physical medium. By this I mean the knowledge that one obtains from interacting with a particular book or piece of technology. For example, if a student is given a book to read and asked to do a book report on it, the book itself is the medium while the student's written book report is the message. The words in the book are the content and/or medium in which the message is hidden in. When the student reads the book and is able to clearly contextualize what he or she has read, whether it be orally or written, then the message of the medium has been obtained. I think this is what McLuhan was try to say with the various examples he gave throughout his work about different types of mediums and how the message is contained in a particular medium. However the examples McLuhan gave in his work rather confused me, so I did a brief research on Google.com on the medium and the message and came across an essay that I believe clearly explains what McLuhan is saying. The essay is entitled, The Medium vs. The Message by Steve Pavlina.

In Pavlina's essay he uses a person's career choice to explain what medium and message is. The basic idea that Pavlina states in his essay is that a person's job title represents the medium of their career, and what knowledge or expertise the person brings to their job title is the message. He further goes on to explain how a person's job title (the medium) is an empty vessel waiting to be filled by one's knowledge (the message) in order to create one's personal growth. This point that Pavlina makes in his work clearly explains to me what McLuhan is trying to say in his essay about using the medium to convey the message. One particular line in McLuhan's essay that ties his and Pavlina's idea together is this: "For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (1). This line basically gets back to what I originally stated in the first paragraph about the message being encoded inside of the medium. Except in this line it goes on to further explain how the introduction of the "message" changes human interaction. Again this sentence ties right back in with what Pavlina was saying about the message one brings to his or her career creates personal growth. I honestly believe that these two particular works are good complements of each other.