Week Twelve: Medium Hot and Cold

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The Medium is the Massage

For all of the past readings I have utilized the audiobook versions. For this week’s reading, I did not have any preceding knowledge about the book and I did not read anything about the Medium is the Message before starting to listen. You can imagine my confusion when I hit play! It was an array of sounds, words and music with no tempo and no organization. At first I thought it was a short snippet of music or sound effects that accompanies the prologues of most audiobooks, but I soon realized that this was the extent of it. I obviously made a mistake in choosing the audiobook instead of physically reading a copy, but it gave me a unique experience.


I could not make sense of anything in the chaos of sound coming out of my computer. After about a half an hour, I was starting to go crazy and turned it off. You don’t know what it was like to listen to the jumble of sound for as long as I did. It was sort of like when you are in a public place and there are a bunch of different sounds, music, and people talking, but none of it makes sense! Your brain tries, but it can’t. It was tiring. That’s when I went online and tried to find out why someone would create such a thing and watched some interviews with Marshall McLuhan. He talked about the importance of medium and the effect it has on the general public. That could have not related more to my current situation. I was trying to listen to a book composed of images. You can’t. By changing the medium, you change the content. 

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