Medium Theory

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, a Canadian literary scholar, Marshall McLuhan, who had a profound understanding of electronic media and its impact on both popular culture and society. It is a analytical theory.

It analysis of media characteristics and the historical analysis of human perception. Popular media content includes television programming specially includes television programming are appear on the surface.  Multiple levels of meaning are often present and sophisticated content itself is ambiguous (vague meaning to their content). They will have a better chance to appealing to different audience. George Gerber distinguished media by the cognitive process each required. He stressed how channels differ not only in terms of their  content but also in regarded to how they awaken and alter thoughts and senses.

Medium theory focused on the medium characterization itself rather than on what it conveys or how information is received. In medium theory a medium is not only a news paper, Television, or the digital camera and so forth.  Rather it is the symbolic environment of any communicative act.  For instance the internet or blogs.

Assumption and declaration of McLuhan Theory regarding medium:

1.Changes in communication technology inevitably produce profound changes in both culture and society orders. 

2.McLuhan argued that technology inevitably cause specific changes in how people think, in how society is structured.

3.McLuhan proclaimed that the medium is the massage. In other words, new forms of media transform our experience of ourselves and our society. The medium is message. We live in message.  The content of new medium is  as old medium. This influence of new forms of media(TV, Internet) is ultimately more important than the content that is transmitted in its specific messages.

4. He suggested the term “global village”. It refers to the new form of social organization that would inevitably emerge electronic media tied the entire world into one great social, political and cultural system.

5. McLuhan proclaimed media to be the extension of the man. He argued that media quite literally extended sight, hearing and touch through time and space

Criticism:

McLuhan work became more accepted within the media industries. It aroused increasing criticism with in academia. The critics is found that his ideas to diverse and inconsistent.

it also have a opinion that, this thinking was no meaning no linear and logically inconsistent and random thoughts only.

His ideas were overly speculative and empirically unverifiable cultivation analysis.