OUGD505 - SB02 - Medium, Message and Distribution

OUGD505

SB02

Medium, Message and Distribution

Medium:
An agency or means of doing something

Message:
a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly.
a significant political, social, or moral point that is being conveyed by a film, speech, etc.

Distribution:
the action of sharing something out among a number of recipients.


IN the 1960's a english professor called Marshall McLuhan challenged contemporaries to think about the media in new ways. McLuhan challenges not to think about what messages or contents that media, such as television, radio and newspapers communicate. Instead, he invites us to focus on the media themselves: on their physical properties, their technological operations, and the social and psychological effects they have on individuals and the societies they live in. ‘The medium is the message’ asks us to consider the mediality and the materiality of media. A focus on the mediality of media forces us to zoom in on the question of what makes a given medium a medium, what makes it a go-between, between two entities?

For McLuhan, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century radically changed the world. The invention of the printing press inaugurated an entirely new culture, a culture that was no longer centred around face-to-face communication. Western societies moved most decisively from oral to literate culture. For McLuhan, Gutenberg's invention of the printing press had radical effects. It really changed the world, introducing new scales, new paces and new patterns.

‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.’

The introduction of personal computers into our lives has fundamentally changed the way we live our lives and fundamentally changed the way we work. From then on, we've been spending much of our daily lives interacting with a machine. They allow us to work from home, blurring the line between our private selves and our business selves. The introduction of laptops has radically changed our lives, much like the introduction of the printing press. McLuhan's famous claim, that the medium is the message, invites us to zoom in, not only on the material and physical properties of new media. It also invites us to think hard about how new media change us and how they change the world we live in.

Written and digital communication will reach the most amount of people. Methods of distribution include:
posters, Facebook ads/pages/groups/ Instagram/ websites/ leaflets / books / promotional merch.