Reading Response #1 (Media 280)

The Medium Is the Message

After the discussion about the reading, The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, I have been thinking about new media, which involve new technologies, surrounding us today, and I think that they make our lives much better and easier. Thus, we are relying on them a lot: they are a huge part of our lives today. As one of the classmates said, we need new technologies even to study in college at least here in the States, for example, Internet. Internet help me a lot to study and do class assignments, especially research papers. I do not need to go to library to find books and read all of them for my research for the paper. I can just google to find books that have what I am looking for, and I can read some of the books online, such as on google book search. Google is amazing. If I type key words that I am looking for in the book, google automatically find the pages that have the key words. In the clip we saw in the class, one of the students raises a paper, saying that she went to online instead of reading textbooks and learned the same thing. It made me think that we could learn anything, even what we are learning in school, from the Internet. Internet has all answer we want to know. This is amazing. However, I have less trust any information that I found on the Internet than in books or newspapers: every time when I discover something new on the Internet, I do not trust it completely; however, I never doubt anything written in books or newspapers even if they are hardly believe. This is interesting. I think that this is what McLuhan says in his essay that contents are never changed no matter what kinds of media they have been broadcasted on; however it is tend to be considered that the content has changed. In other words, people tend to think that new media change the contents even though they did not change. I do not say that I think new media are bad or they always wrong, but this is sure that I have less trust on new media than old media, such as books, newspapers, etc. The reason is that new media allow more people to get involved. Internet is a good example of this. Everyone can get to have own website and write anything basically they want to. On the other hand, books and newspapers are different. Authors do enough research of what they are going to write in their books or articles. In addition to it, humans have been reading newspapers to get more information and news since the 17th century. Books have a longer history than that. Therefore, people have a long history with books and newspapers, and that history creates readers’ trusts. On the other hand, Internet has popularized recently, and humans do not have any long history with new technologies, so that they cannot believe as much as paper media, such as books and newspapers, I believe. I do not think that all the information on the Internet is wrong: most of websites have information came from something official materials. Even Wikipedia has note section that have all links to where the information came from, therefore we can look them up to see if the information is right or wrong. However, even if the information came from an official material, it is still harder to believe for me than getting the information by reading books, even if the contents are exactly the same. I though that it is very interesting.