3rd
Medium is the Message
A friend and I were talking about why I tended towards books and she tended towards films. At the heart of it, we engage for the same reason: as a metaphor for our own lives. To learn ephemerally. To think from an objective outside perspective. But what are the differences between the mediums that turn me onto the written word and her onto the visual one?
The core argument I was trying to make was that the mediums encourage different methods of interaction. Just like how users tend towards default configurations, readers and watchers tend towards what the medium makes convenient. Classic medium is the message argument:
All media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual’s understanding of it.
Her argument, I think, stemmed from the fact that television and films tend to be more culturally relevant. As technology cheapens and becomes more ubiquitous, our society naturally tends towards higher definition media. That’s true. If you want to learn about 19th-century London, read Dickens. If you want to learn about 21st-century Baltimore, watch The Wire.
There is an argument to be made that classic novels talk about the human condition — and that is universal. If you want to learn about yourself — if you want to learn how best to view the world from your own eyes — philosophy hasn’t changed for the last couple hundred years. We still grapple with the same questions as our great-grandfathers before us.
But this doesn’t detract from television’s place. If you want to learn about the real world — your place in it: how the world views you — your best bet is to learn from others who are stuck in the same broken era. You’ll learn far more about how to navigate the modern hospital from watching House and looking up the more wicked-sounding maladies than from reading an org-chem textbook.
She said: “I’ve watched so many movies i think they are a better representation of real life, of things that actually happen to people.” I guess what it comes down to is that I’m probably an idealist, an escapist, both. I might be good at dealing with practical realities, but in the end, I do so out of necessity, not inherent love for the game. (Okay, maybe just a little.)
This is too much philosophizing, so fuck it, I’m off to watch Southpark.
