Medium is the message

“Medium is the message” is a famous aphorism by Marshall McLuhan. It meaning the different form of a message such as TV, print and radio determines the ways in which that message will be perceived. It would also affect our life, feeling and social circle by change over time. I fully agree with this statement.

From the past, tower cries used to make public announcements in the streets. They would use oral to spread the message to the citizens. Then, citizens would share and discuss the message in the group. Apart from the message, medium as oral can be the message as well. The news can be spread out two times or above. A person might share the news with emotion or idea to third person, thus, there would be a different feeling and version when other people received the message. Therefore, people would have different though by the way in which medium to present.

According to the concept “hot and cold media” by McLuhan, speech is a cold media because of low definition and high participation compare with radio. But by the change over time, instead of the tower cries, we can receive the news from the different medium, newspaper, web news, internet, TV and radio. Readers can discuss and leave their comment on the web sites.

There are a lot of  musical shows in the world such as “Wicked”. I watched this show in last year, it was a fantastic experience. “Wicked” also published as original novel. When I read the novel at the first time, it was a different feeling compare with the musical, it’s more detail and the story was published on 491 pages. Besides there are lots of different version of the book include the language translation. But, musical may need more sense of human. It’s including light effects, dialogues, songs and actors’ performance. And, there are lots of audiences watching the show with you at the same time. It is not only vision sense compare with the novel. Therefore, a form of medium transfer the message will affect our feeling and thought.

Student Name: Chan Chau Ling