Week 2: The medium is the message

As a challenge to myself this week I said, “I will not talk about digital texts and how the change in medium affects the reading experience” since I’m sure there will be amble opportunity throughout the term (and since I have a tendency towards that kind of material generally). Instead, I went to my bookshelf.  However, once I gave the shelf a once over the one text  that jumped out at me –the one text whose form undoubtedly influences the reader’s experience –  was Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, produced by Jerome Agel. I owe my frequent use of the term “medium” to McLuhan and the strong influence he and his legacy had over my undergraduate education in the Book and Media Studies program at U of T. So, though discussing this book may not be a daunting task, I certainly think the legacy of McLuhan to both Media Studies and Book History is worth a blog post.

While in Book History we have Roger Chartier, a well known book historian and publishing scholar, saying:

“...it is essential to remember that no text exists outside of the support that enables it to be read; any comprehension of a writing, no matter what kind it is, depends on the forms in which it reaches its reader.” (1989, p. 161)

In media studies we find McLuhan echoing a similar (though more deterministic) statement that

“all media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.” (McLuhan & Fiore, 1996, p. 26)

For both Chartier (1989) and McLuhan & Fiore (1996), the form/medium of a text (thinking of text in a broad sense to include books, film, photography, computer document, etc.) affects the reader’s experience of that work.

If you’re not familiar with The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Fiore, it’s a really great visually interesting and somewhat manic introduction to the work and core ideas you’ll find in McLuhan’s longer works (such as The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media). As a physical text The Medium is the Massage plays with the ideas it discusses in the content. The fact that this text is “produced” speaks to the character of the work in a nut shell. This book needed a PRODUCER, just like a blockbuster film. The book is made up photos (old, new, edited, zoomed WAY in, you name it), comics, excerpts from literature (Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland makes an appearance), quotations from other scholars, and content written by McLuhan and Fiore. All this content works together to bring the reader’s attention to both the medium at hand, but also the specific media it discusses throughout.

Because there’s so much going on in this book, I thought I would share and comment on a couple direct examples you might find interesting. First, I want to highlight a 2 page spread that forces the reader to physically interact with the text.

Photo by Abigail Sparling

The only way to read this spread, unless you’re really good at training your brain, is to get up from your comfy reading spot and hold the text up in front of a mirror. By requiring the reader to interact with the text in an unexpected way, McLuhan and Fiore not only demonstrate the power of the medium over the reader, but encourage the reader to think about the ways a medium can shape their reading experience. (Try reading this on your laptop for instance, I bet it will make you feel silly.)

Another way the book plays with form is by exploiting the sequential pagination. For instance, the following spread is disrupted by additional pages:

Photo by Abigail Sparling

Written in small font on the otherwise blank pages interrupting the spread is “Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception” (p. 84-85). Here, the break in between the images is used to reinforce the authors' message and emphasize the inability to fully perceive "environments." 

These are just two examples of the creative manipulation of the book's form used to reinforce McLuhan's work on media - the rest of the book is equally rich. Even if you aren't a fan of McLuhan and his work, I would argue that this book is still worth a look. Written content aside, the book's great use of graphic design and it's playfulness with form will likely interest anyone who loves unique books.

For those who haven’t experienced the book you can view it in full at the following archive.org link (hopefully legally?): https://archive.org/details/pdfy-vNiFct6b-L5ucJEa

Work Cited:

Chartier, Roger. "Texts, Printing, Readings." In The New Cultural History: Essays, edited by Biersack, Aletta and Lynn Hunt, 154-175. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage : An Inventory of Effects, produced by Agel, Jerome. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1996.