The Medium is the Message

That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good.

Some of these analogies raise problems for me, because I do in fact believe that, for example, a gun is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad. There are many circumstances in which is can be used for what I believe is good in the sense that I value self-preservation. And obviously there are just as many hypothetical circumstances in which a gun could be used for terrible things. While it's nice to believe that the message is generally static and a reflection of it's medium, the "message" of shooting someone can have many different context, and while the end result may be the same (being shot) the message may be very different in different circumstances. The act of shooting an enemy soldier during wartime is very different than shooting someone who has invaded your home, and different still than the shooting of someone during a heist.

The anecdote of the African man who listened to the BBC every day without understanding a word of it is quaint, however the fact that the man enjoyed the broadcast without understanding the language says nothing about listeners who did understand it. The message may be fluid; the medium obviously informs the message, but in the case of radio, the message is not wholly and universally "radio". An example that's brought up in CADRE frequently is Photoshop: The designers of Photoshop have enabled the development of an almost infinite number of images with their software, but the very finite tool-set is what determines what images may be created, and so in a sense they have "pre-created" all the images that will ever be produced with Photoshop (and most likely many that won't). This doesn't mean that these images have no value other than as a meme-like carrier for the idea of "Photoshop", however. What, then, happens when I manipulate a photo of a painting in Photoshop, then fax it? Someone's head explodes, semiotically, I assume.