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The Trouble with Gerrold: The Internet massage


By David Gerrold


 David Gerrold
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September 24, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 5)
I mark 1975 as the year that personal computing really began. It was when the Altair and the IMSAI S-100 machines first hit the market. That was Year Zero.

In 8 BC (Before Computers), a fellow named Marshall McLuhan published a book called “The Medium Is the Massage.” He postulated that the way we receive content massages us—the way the information is delivered affects us even more than the content itself.

A newspaper can give us lots of information, but a radio commentator summarizing that information gives us an emotional envelope. A picture gives us a visceral impact; a moving picture gives us a direct experience. A small black-and-white television image is a gritty blur, demanding concentration. A high-def wall-size screen overwhelms us with its illusion of reality.

Part of that, of course, is how much information is being delivered and at what rate. The high-def television delivers more information per second than a whole newspaper can deliver in a week. It’s a different kind of information, but it has an enormous physical and emotional effect that we are not immediately conscious of. And that’s the massage that McLuhan was discussing.

One of the best examples of the effect of the massage is Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Radio had established itself as a voice of immediate authority. You got speeches from the president and reports of the war in Europe, you got music and news and commentary. Even the commercials were presented as authoritative. So when Orson Welles used that same context to deliver an invasion from Mars, radio audiences were already conditioned to believe it.

But there are other examples as well. The Nazi propaganda machine depended on the credibility of newspapers, magazines, movies and radio to give its propaganda the illusion of credibility. Likewise, the Soviet Union. Populations that had not yet had the opportunity to learn how to assimilate the new media—movies and radio—assumed that what they were seeing and hearing was accurate. It wasn’t until much later that a healthy skepticism about all media began to develop.


Related Search Term(s): Marshall McLuhan

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Comments


10/01/2012 10:40:19 PM EST

Ger, you rock. Ok, specifically you are talking about social changes that I am seeing and articulating the stages in a way that I could not. I got my first PC when I was 34, in 1995. I had a fear that the teenyboppers of the world would have the job jump on me in a few years if I didn't get my butt in gear. The first one cost $3k A PacBell, post 386. It had the wrong software. The modem port and printer port wouldn't work properly. Luckily I got the right geek (a woman!) on the phone and she rectified the sitch with me by sending me a new disk. Then I fried the modem with static. The tech was nice and sent me a new one without charging me. Very nice. I belonged to Compuserve forums then. I loved them with a passion. I was addicted to the net from the beginning. Today, unemployable, I sit in front of the machine and try to save the animals and the stupid Right-Wing/Anti-vaccine/Hyper-religous. I wonder if I do any real good. But then I think that everything I ever really knew was hyperspace-jumped by the internet. Thanks for the Trouble with Tribbles, dude. Alycia in CT

United StatesAlycia Keating


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