Undertanding media seems an unassuming phrase…but it is anything but. Marshall McLuhan tried to explain over 40 years ago, but we still, for the most part, don’t quite get it.
Not to say we can stop trying, as now that we spend so much of our day focusing our attention on screens, of whatever size, we’d really benefit from knowing what affect this was having on us. And questions like “what is the optimal balance between F2F time and “online screen” time in a “blended classroom“, depend on understanding media if we are to make informed and useful decisions.
Maybe the best way to condense what McLuhan was saying down to a sentence or two, might be “the media is the massage”. IOW, media has an effect on us quite independent of the “content” we are aware of…one might as well describe that effect as the “content of the media itself”. Thus “the media is the message, or the media is the massage“.
We know that generations that grow up using a particular form of media, are “different” in hard to define ways from generations that grew up using a different form of media. IOW, the content of the media itself has been somehow embedded in the consciousness of those who spend their young growing years “consuming” it.
That this should all sound vague and be hard to talk about has little to do with the need for the understanding, and very much to do with how hard it is to be aware of something and “do it” at the same time. But clearly something different is going on when we “connect with someone using online tools” and when we connect with someone in the same physical space up close enough to smell their deodorant, or cologne, or shampoo.
So we depend on the “art” of presentation, much more than the “science” of presentation. We use media in unconscious ways, and “hope for the best”. Here’s a paragraph from the recent Guardian story on brain training:
Pay close to attention to your voice
You may have noticed that sometimes you can get charged up just listening to the sound of someone delivering a lecture, whereas someone else might be a very thoughtful teacher but have a voice that drones on and drains your energy and puts you to sleep.
What differentiates voices that charge us up from those that “discharge” us is the vocal frequencies, and the ability of the person speaking to hear the subtle differences in their own voice. The person who has the rich voice has it because their ability to listen is superior, not because of their vocal chords.
If you listen very carefully to what you are saying as you speak – to the sound of it, not just the content – you will refine it, and energise it, into a voice that charges, as opposed to one that drains yourself and others.
This kind of sounds like a “Understanding Media” problem…and the solution is extremely vague. But at least it recognizes the full complexity of the human voice as a medium of communication enough to know that sometimes it “works” and sometimes it “doesn’t”.
What does having a “rich voice” mean? Is that definable?
Note that the above doesn’t differentiate whether the voice in question is live and in person, or recorded and being played back over speakers.
We’ve been through various “stages” of predominant media, starting with cave man early vocalizations through the discovery of language, and then written language, and then printed language, and then telegraph, telephone and television…all leading up to the cloud of media we now live in.
Just as with learning how our brain works, we have much work to do in understanding how media work, when designing and conducting DLE.