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The Medium is the Message

by Elise Sterback

Images by Andy Bamford

When it comes to recognising the power of images and visual media, designers know best. We laypeople, myself included, are often unaware of how our interpretations of various media are influenced through careful construction and manipulation of the images and text we are seeing.

Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan was known for his argument about how the different mediums used to convey messages can shape the substance of the message itself. He believes that content has little influence on people in society; rather, it is the medium which determines how people receive the message. He uses the analogy of a light bulb – which has no content in itself, but creates an environment ‘by its mere presence’.

With the rapid development of technology which we are currently experiencing in society, new mediums of expression are constantly becoming available to us. The development of the internet has seen all other mediums of expression virtually subsumed within its great tidal wave of cyber-reality. Of course, print media and film and television are still published in their original forms, but if google can’t find it, it might as well not exist.

In the selection of what medium we use to convey our messages, we need to consider the different characteristics of the medium and in what unique way they engage the viewer. On the internet, factors like searchability, loading time and the universality of appeal and comprehension, impact dramatically on how we choose to present ideas and information. The internet requires content to compete with unprecedented amounts of almost identical messages, with an audience that is highly mobile in how it accesses this content. Information must also be able to stretch across vast expanses of time and space in ways that other mediums have never demanded.

McLuhan was also known for the adage – “we shape our tools and our tools shape us”. How do your tools shape you as designers? If we are becoming more and more accustomed to designing for web and screen-based formats – with computers, for computers – will we see the loss of whole forms of expression? I was recently impressed by the artwork of a friend of mine, who spent hours cutting out by hand (hands on scissors, not hands on a mouse) photos of people which she layered into a collage, she then found a colour setting on the photocopier which allowed her to reprint it in a variety of hues, giving a strange effect that could not be created in quite the same way on our beloved Photoshop.

Do we celebrate the burgeoning of information and access that new mediums are offering us, or is there something to be mourned as old tools and sites of expression fade into history? If we continue to embrace new forms of medium to the exclusion of all others that came before, we might risk not only losing the visual peculiarities and delights of the past, but also the messages that they carried.