It took me awhile to understand Marshall McLuhan, even though we only had to read two chapters. He lays out his main idea early on in the chapter, “The medium is the message.” But what does that mean?
He defines medium as any extension of ourselves and message as a change of scale, pace, or pattern that the medium introduces into human affairs. He says that oftentimes we are blinded by the content of a medium, so he’s trying to shift us away from this way of thinking, and instead, says we should focus on the actual source and its effects on society. Simply put, if our medium changes, we’ll get a new message. It’s like how books are going digital via the Kindle. The content (which book) doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a reflection on our society’s evolution. We’re becoming more tech-savvy, we want things instantly, we want more options. Also books being sold in PDF form illustrate that we’re more open to sharing. The PDF books that I have purchased were provided because the authors were more concerned with gaining readers than they were about profits. By avoiding the publisher, they figured that they could charge less and reach more people if they just sold the PDF online. It worked for me! I wouldn’t have bought the book had it not been a $15 PDF.
In his next chapter, he divides the world of media into two groups: hot and cold. Hot media is high-definition (gives us lots of data, like a photo), requires little participation (film is fed to us, we just have to sit and absorb), and is exclusive. Examples include film, radio, and a lecture. Cold media is low-defintion (relatively simple, like the animation for The Simpsons), requires high participation (we have to fill in the gaps, like in comic strips), and tends to include people. Examples: phone, speech, TV, seminar. He gave a lot of examples to illustrate the difference between cold and hot, but I was confused about some of them. TV is just a short film to me, yet it’s considered cold instead of hot because?
In Jonathan Lethem’s article, The Ecstasy of Influence, he talks about the fine line between influence and plagiarism. My thoughts resonate with Lethem’s– it doesn’t hurt or change the original artist’s work, so why is it wrong to pay homage, like the Iranian film did with J.D. Salinger’s Zooey and Franny? I think that a simple acknowledgement that the work was inspired by J.D. Salinger should suffice. If I were an artist, I would be flattered to be an inspiration to someone. They can borrow and copy to their heart’s content as long as I’m mentioned in their notes somewhere. You see this kind of stuff in web design all the time, prominent designers get their designs ripped off, and it’s pretty obvious because they’ll leave all the original author comments in there. They don’t want to sue them, they just want a simple note of thanks or recognition.
As I was reading On The Rights of Molotov Man, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to be the Molotov Man, Pablo Arauz. Seeing that photo of him with his child, I wonder how he feels, being preserved on t-shirts and in plazas as the Molotov Man. Meiselas said it’s more about protecting the image of Pablo Arauz, than it is about using an image without permission. When framed in this way, I do see why copyrights are such a guarded property.
I think the point in supplementing the McLuhan reading with the other three articles was to illustrate that we’re focusing on the content rather than the medium. There are bigger issues than who copied whom. In the end, a photo is a photo. The content, whether it was the original photograph or the decontextualized one, is irrelevant.