The Best of Science Fiction 12

Getting back from media (like phlogiston, ether, spirit messages, poetry, oil paints, or mushrooms) to The Media —

Would you believe that Gilbert Thomas was the highest-rated TV newscaster in all the Hawaiian Islands in 1959? True. Altogether he has had more than a quarter-century in The Media: newscasting, commentating, producing, packaging, directing and writing for radio and TV, from Buffalo to Saigon. He now sandwiches articles on the Far East (for Asia, Saturday Review, etc.) and occasional short stories in between script-writing jobs.

Of course the medium is not the message: I mean, obviously, the message is not the medium. Q. E. D.

There was some basis for my wariness about the Pop Prof: between the beginning of his cult in 1951 and hitting the Big Time in 1964, he acquired one besetting, and audience-besotting, sin. Whether through carelessness or (miscalculation, it adds up to the too frequent subordination of his message by his own medium, words: the sacrifice of clarity to the hypnotic cadence of pop-talk, pun-fun, and the catch-phrase. For example: 1) He describes the 'participation involvement' of TV-viewing as 'cool' — the 'fragmented' detachment of the reader as 'hot'. (The reason: a course in Contemp. Eng. from uncool Jack Paar, who got told by a put-on kid that 'cool' means 'hot' nowadays.) 2) From 'The Medium is the Message', the most-quoted chapter of the most-quoted Book of McLuhan, Understanding Media:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

For 'artist', read 'craftsman' or 'technician': the pastry chef, cobbler, engineer, or copywriter has, of necessity, the same 'expert awareness' of the effects of his own medium on sense perception as the painter, oboist, or poet. Now replace that adventurous 'encounter' with pedantic old 'relate to': the awareness can be applied not only as consumer, but as creator.

3) Maybe: 'Any medium is also a message'?

Put them all together, they don't swing the same way, but they spell out an important message: that the serious artist, too, can do as for instance, the Adman must do — design the message going into the medium to include and take advantage of the message of (in this case) The Media.