“New technologies have an extraordinary potential, if used to favor understanding and human solidarity.” —Benedict XVI via video on the Vatican’s new YouTube channel.
The Pope on YouTube? Amazing. I wonder how this new media will change the message the Catholic Church as been delivering for over 2,000 years.
Change the message you ask?
Yep. The media used to deliver information is thought to form that information to one extent or another.
Years ago, media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” which, as I understand it, means that the media used to deliver information actually affects the content of that information.
Is this so? Consider, say, a mystery novel made into a movie. More of the story background and the personal thoughts of the characters can be available to the reader than can be expressed on film. Because of this, the message the viewer takes away with him likely will be somewhat different than the message the reader takes away.
We see this effect in e-mail when it takes the place of phone conversations. E-mail has a chance of sounding curt or cold because the vocal tones that can be conveyed over the phone are missing.
Thus the information or message received by the reader of an e-mail can change from the one that would be conveyed in a spoken conversation. Of course neither one of them includes the body language that is so much part of the communication—and part of the message—when the media is a person conversing with another face to face.
McLuhan, a deep thinker when it came to communications, coauthored a book titled The Medium Is the Message. As the story goes, when it came back from the printer, a typo made the title The Medium Is the Massage. McLuhan, feeling this mistake was supportive of the point he was trying to make allowed the title, as misprinted, to stand.
As readers, authors, and publishers we need to embrace the best parts of the new technologies and retain the best parts of the old.