The Message is the Medium...Maybe

Among this week's readings is a work by seminal communications expert Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message."  McLuhan asserts that the medium by which content is delivered is just as important, maybe even more so actually, than the content itself. Thus the medium can be a message in and of itself regardless of the content. Hmm, very interesting.

As evidence of this mutually dependent relationship McLuhan cites technologies as ubiquitious as electric light, and figures as varied as Alexis De Tocqueville and Napoleon Bonaparte. Said Napoleon, "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets."  No disrespect to McLuhan but I believe his analysis is a little flawed.  Let's examine for a second McLuhan's own evidence with the Napoleon quote. Napoleon had it right. A hostile press can do far more damage than a thousand bayonets. And why might that be? Because of the content.  Inflammatory rhetoric has a reach that extends far beyond any battlefield and  has the added advantage of being self renewing. Information is infinite and has no mass. Unlike weapons, rhetoric doesn't require proximity to be effective. Additionally, rhetoric, i.e. content, has the power to mobilize mass mobs of opposition - opposition that is of course well armed. Hence it's not the medium - the newspaper - that mobilizes but the content of said newspaper. Articles detailing the latest exploits of Ke$sha or Justin Bieber don't inspire civil unrest, (not necessarily anyway) but exposes on social injustice do. Just ask the leaders of Egypt. Oh wait, we can't.

The events unfolding right now in Egypt are yet another example of the power of the message.  When the government there literally shut down the internet it begged the question, why?  Were Egyptian teens spending too much time playing Cityville? Was Mubarak peeved because ElBaradei had more Facebook friends?  I doubt it.  However could a growing resistance movement be mobilized, organized and united by a an uninterrupted flow of information?  Yes. Could the flames of discontent be fed by fresh reports of  abuses and injustices? You bet. By shutting down the internet the government was attempting to stifle the flow of information because it is information that inspires uprisings.

That's not to say that the medium bears no significance in the equation. Indeed it is both the medium and the message working in tandem that challenges the status quo. My argument is simply that the message may be slightly superior to the medium because without which the medium loses it's value. Again, this is supported by McLuhan's own examples.  What good would a working light bulb be if we couldn't make use of it's light to consume content? We don't read the light bulb we use the light bulb to read the paper - or the blog as it were. The relationship between content and medium is mutually dependent but not necessarily one of equals.