Marshall McLuhan apparently coined the term “the medium is the message” … circa 1964 in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). I havn’t read the book. I’ve only read the wikipedia entry. But its enough (for what I’m thinking about).
My gripe with much of sound works today is that they dont do much more than explore what is possible with technology. So it is very easy to say, ok, fine, well I accept it, the message is in the medium. And so the message is about the possibilities of technology, and about how it can cast our thinking (or our sounds) into different worlds which asks us to perceive things differently . etc. etc. bla bla etc. etc.
This is not what McLuhan was saying. His point is more sinister. He is saying that the “real” message doesn’t just lie in the medium … it is actually *hidden* in the medium, obfuscated by the apparent subject of the message. For example; a news bulletin communicates that someone has been murdered. The real message is that we voluntarily consume horrific stories whilst sitting in our lounge rooms. Why do we do that? Its quite senseless … but it reveals something. Maybe something about irrationality.
I’m going to say that thought is the medium … and the content of thought (everything we think about) is the message. The content of thought (the stuff we think about) obscures the real message … which is the mechanism of thought. The mechanism of thought is the message… and it is a message that is heavily obscured by the contents of what we think about.
The content of thought … is heavy, rich, complex, deep, wide, chaotic, historic, memoric, unfathomable. The mechanism of thought is not that complicated … but it is hidden … deeply deeply hidden by the chaos of the content of thought.
Thought starts with a goal, and doesn’t stop until the goal is satisfied. That’s all. Some goals are either unsatisfiable or incessantly sporn other goals … that (or something like that) causes irrationality. Incessant goals pulling in different directions.
How can I express that in a spatial audio composition?
I think it was a metaphor, not a literal statement:
” … there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.” ”
http://marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/
McLuhan was interested by contexts and the effects of production and delivery methods. My understanding is that spatial audio is a technique to create contexts and habits. I like his talk about our relationship to space (“Speaking Freely hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall McLuhan”, http://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html)
Hi Marc,
Great audio recording. I was originally going to discuss McLuhan’s quotable quote WRT ambisonics … because I think ambisonics is cast as a medium …. but really ambisonics *is* the message. The contents of an ambisonic piece is irrelevant… in fact the contents of an ambisonic piece is just stuff that hides the message (which is embedded in the medium). And the message is about hyper-reality. I’m going to blog it.