Week 3 Reading Reaction

This week's readings picked up from the readings of last week about the symbiotic relationship that is developed as a consequence of the interaction between humans and machines. This week's readings which included an article by the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, discusses how the medium by which communication is rendered is in fact that which shapes, controls and influences the message that is ultimately communicated. McLuhan gives multiple examples in his reading, but one the simplest that I found was his example of the movie projector. Before the invention of the movie projector, images were demonstrated as they actually happened in the present moment. With the development of the movie projector, time was now able to be sequenced and transitioned in such as way as to change the pace by which the information was received. This change in sequence, according to McLuhan, changes the sequence from images that were once demonstrated in real time to those that were now reconfigured so as to speed up the sequence by which the process on interaction changes. For McLuhan, this is significant because as he point out the content of a medium is always another medium, which I find deeply interesting and confusing. For McLuhan there is ultimately no beginning just a period of chaos from which medium is born and develops from one creative intent feeding off of another. The purpose of his article is to ultimately find that understanding the medium by which something is communicated is in it of itself a message and therefore must be considered to have an impact and a trajectory on how such a message is received. No medium is developed with a vacuum but has a purpose such a purpose renders the symbiotic relationship between the message intended and the message received affected in numerous ways that may not always be the perceived intent.