Medium Coffee

Introduction

As we have said in class repeatedly, those who think that technology is neutral are absolutely wrong. Nothing displays this truth better than Marshall Mcluhan’s famous quote that “the medium is the message” from his book Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man. As pointed out by Applen, this means that “the technology we create” has a large effect on our society, thus inputting a message to the world.

These messages can be very small. The example that comes to my mind quickest is what we discussed in class about Iphones being designed with right-handed people in mind. Apple chose to do that for business purposes, as a majority of users are right-handed and thus they must prioritize them in order to turn a profit. This gets the message across that Apple cares more about turning a profit than their left-handed customers. Even if it was not necessarily intentional, that message is still there.

I first heard the phrase “The medium is the message” when I was in middle school. I was confused about what it meant until I was able to apply it to something I understood: comic books (surprise surprise).

Anecdote

In 1985, DC Comics published the comic book miniseries “Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The series immediately gained massive acclaim for its deconstructionist superhero style. This led to DC wanting a film adaptation, which Moore fought as best as he could. Eventually, DC won.

The film is remarkably accurate to its source material. The comic directly inspired almost all of the dialogue, cinematography, and plot. The director even said he forewent the process of storyboarding the film. Instead, he used the comic itself as the storyboard.

However, much of what gave the comic its own special identity was lost in the film entirely because the prior was a comic and the latter was a film. There were simply many things that the comic was capable of doing (that it took full advantage of) that the film was not able to do.

For example, the character of Doctor Manhattan has the superpower to view time as a constant. There is no past, present, or future. Instead, time is like one image he can look at all at once. Getting this concept across in a comic is elementary, as comic book readers also view time that way. One panel depicting October and another depicting November could be right beside each other. In this way, the reader could easily understand Manhattan’s position. Films, in contrast, can only show the viewer one shot at a time (not counting split-screen which is notoriously unpopular). An inherent message of the book is lost not through fault of the creators, but because the medium had changed.