By Alex Prong
When I was a TA for an introductory media theory course, the first thing I would remind my students is that media is the plural form of medium. It may seem obvious, but no obvious thing should ever go unexamined, especially in the realm of all things theory. When folks outside of academia or even outside of the field of media studies think of the word media, they often think of the digital media landscape: social media, news media, TV and movies, maybe music. But in our first year courses we teach students to keep in mind the way that any medium communicates something to the user. A T-shirt is a medium (even one that doesn’t have pithy words on it). A style of architecture, a garden, a certain colour, the weather, street signs, a tone of voice: these are all media. The world is a semantic playground and meaning is always shifting. Dizzy yet?
Amidst this subject-expanding thought process, there are a few theorists that can be grounding. Ultimately they will all point us to the same conclusions: that print is not dead, that print will never be dead, that print communicates differently than any other medium, and that print matters. What follows is an exploration of a few of the trendy slogans of media theory and what they have to offer to questions of materiality and print.
Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message”
Marshall McLuhan is unavoidable in media studies, not that you’d want to avoid him, considering his ideas were all cuckoo bananas and completely accurate. He was a bit of an academic “bad boy,” given that he was dismissed by mainstream academics and often showed up on popular television to give interviews. He was also Canadian! He delivered his theories in bizarre ways (like a borderline-unlistenable vinyl record, for example) in order to practice what he preached.
The medium is the message was an aphorism that intervened in popular academic practice of the time which looked strictly to analyze the content of popular media—this was the 60s, so there was a lot of panic about how the content of newfound popular television would be affecting people. McLuhan said that rather than look to the content being espoused by a given medium, theorists should think about the effects of that medium itself. The question changes from “what stories are being told” to “how are stories being told.” What does television itself do?
A good example to understand this shift is thinking about the invention of the printing press. Before the printing press, reading was a collective activity. There would be very few copies of printed material that would have been painstakingly printed by hand. Often one literate person would read aloud for a group to disseminate whatever was in the book—usually religion. Then, when the medium changed and books became readily available, reading became an individual pastime. The message of the printed book becomes one of individuality and independent thought (regardless of the actual content of the book which may say “love thy neighbor” or some other nonsense). McLuhan later shifted his aphorism to become “the medium is the massage” to point out how media are extensions of the human senses (print being an extension of the eye), which expand our ability to perceive the world around us. What a joy to be massaged! (Sometimes…)
Paul Virilio: “The invention of the ship is the invention of the shipwreck”
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist who was less optimistic about technological progress than McLuhan. The above quote is a favourite of undergraduate media studies students; at my alma mater, there were hundreds of us running around during orientation week with this quote on the back of our T-shirts, feeling like we’d discovered some secret about the universe that needed to be spread via our wearable medium. The gist of this quote is that every new technology holds within it its negation—entropy is real and everything will ultimately fall to chaos. Whether it be through planned obsolescence, a clumsy drop into the toilet, or just inevitable technological failure, every piece of technology, every medium, will eventually break down or fail. It is only a question of when. But when we are using a given medium — or extension of our senses, to put McLuhan into practice—we often forget about this inherent impermanence until it stops working for us. Somehow, the shipwreck is always a surprise. Things are supposed to work. So as we keep inventing things, we simultaneously invent more failure, all the while pretending this time things will be different. The stakes raise with the ambition of the technology; one book decaying or burnt is a very different problem than 1984 being erased from the libraries of every school in America. It is wise to keep in mind when you are championing a new invention you are also championing whatever happens when it breaks down.
Borrowed from Design Theory: Affordances and Constraints
So, a given medium is both affecting the user in inconspicuous ways and a ticking time bomb of failure. By the time students learn about affordances and constraints, they tend to be so pessimistic about the use of technology that these ideas seem to be a breath of fresh air. Affordances and constraints offer a way of thinking about media that is more holistic and departs from any linear evolution of media that would see a given medium as obsolete as it is replaced by a new medium. Rather, the media ecology holds many media up as yes, maybe extensions of a sense, but also constraints to the senses not being used. For example, television may afford audio-visual stimulation, but it doesn’t do much for the other senses; scent, taste, and touch are constraints of the medium. A book affords a tacticity that other visual media are constrained from: the feel of the page, the smell of paper both old and new. It also affords ownership outside of the control of fickle technological oligarchies (a constraint of pretty much any digital media), as well as a non-economically motivated sharing economy outside of capital. Print media has a long history of covert resistance to power. Print affords marginalia. Print affords the ability to be hidden in the real world. Not to mention, the act of reading and writing on a physical medium affords stronger literacy and grammar skills. The brain connects with the pen on the page in a different way than with the keys of a keyboard. When mistakes are only found via a red squiggly line, this affords the muscle of the brain to become frail with disuse.
Media studies is full of irony. For example, I’m writing this on Google Docs and I haven’t drafted it on real-honest-to-god-from-a-tree paper first. I will always fight for physical books, but I recently did cave in and bought an e-reader because I was living in a van and there wasn’t space for the amount of books I need in my life to feel sane. Digital writing affords ease, accessibility, and sometimes it is the only medium available—as is often the case for books that are out of print. But it is worth considering the ways that you can bolster print media in your media ecology. The message that print media communicates is one against the higher-stakes entropic failure afforded by digital media. There is a reason they still call it “book-smart.” There is a reason that the metaphors of a good life come from print media: “turning a new page,” “starting a new chapter,” “never judge a book by its cover.” The printing press may have been invented in 1440, but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
