Understanding the concept that McLuhan’s made famous was
very intriguing. Even though the definition wasn’t clear what I understood from
his statement was that you needed a certain “medium” to get to importance of
the “message.” In other words you needed a bridge to get from point A to point
B. As Shannon explained in the book, entropy was a measure of uncertainty not
of disorder. The difference between disorder and uncertainty is that disorder
has a definition, you know what it is. As for uncertainty the objective is a lost
cost. Shannon also expressed the difficulty in the transmission of the message;
while determining the surprise factor in a way that it is uncertain and unpredictable.
The media example I created (http://freddy-reyes.com/35/information.html)
is something simple and to the point. The media becomes the website and the web
that allows the individual to get to it desired message. Of course along the
road you will view uncertainty, difficulty to understand and with a surprise of
where the medium will lead you to. Everything has a purpose but not everything
will be clear as to how it will accomplish its designed task. This could come
into play with the example of the turrets that were talked about in the chapter
and how they were using them to lock on the target. What is going to get you there is the goal the
task the objective but everything else becomes uncertain, difficult and surprise
to see what will come out of the actual production of the turret?
I think the media example you provided to expresses McLuhans quote and uncertainty was effective. Given the context you provided, I questioned the medium that was used to transmit the message. The message in this case was Facebook’s homepage. But the means you used to deliver it were hyperlinks from webpages with minimal content. I wasn’t sure where I was headed with each click. It seems like we only question mediums when they are somehow distorted, uncertain, and have an element of surprise to them. Your example showed this.
ReplyDeleteA side note about McLuhan and the quote you referenced: I get the sense that Gleick doesn’t respect the work of McLuhan. Or at least, I don’t think he views him in the same way as Shannon and the others. In his book, he quickly contrasts McLuhan’s famous quote with Shannon’s view of the same concept and writes, “the channel was subject to rigorous mathematical treatment.” (Gleick 263) And he later adds that when McLuhan wrote that quote he was being arch, which means deliberately being playful. At any rate, both McLuhan and Shannon operated in different worlds. One was a philosopher and the other was a scientist.