dude, the medium is the message, far out - Alexis, Ramy, Sean

In the first reading, the media is the message, Marchall McLuhan attempts to distinguish the communicative properties of message and medium. He discovers that that the content of any medium is just another medium.This portrays meaning as greatly attributed to the medium itself, instead of the message. As a result, our values become a of function of the mediums we use to communicate and not much else.

The reading from Stewart Hall's Encoding Decoding explores the processes of meaning through mediums. Hall explains the process a message being distributed throughout a network and how the message must be encoded/decoded between nodes to be communicated effectively.

Our group was strongly in disagreement with the first text. His arguments were essentially founded on the basis he was trying to establish. "For the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." So in essence, the meaning of technology is in the measurable change to human behavior. However, one can argue that technology has the ability to create new behaviors and not just augment pre existing ones. Although the Internet made it possible to communicate quickly (communication the operand that became more efficient with technology), does this in itself not initiate a change in values? Would this change of values not effectively create new behavior patterns that one could argue were not derivative of pre-existing ones? As hard an argument to maintain, (the difference between pre-existing behaviors vs new ones) its important to address such issues when talking about them at all. For not addressing this issue McLuhan created a lot of confusion.

The second text talks about the interpretation of meaningful discourse and defends his point that it is not an individual event. We find this idea full of holes as he then tries to present different code sets that a person may use when they are "reading" a message. The text used the televisual process as an example when we believe he couldn't have picked a worse example to transmit his argument. His ideal of a perfectly transparent communication can not be achieved and we find that he is simply attempting to explain why by referring to different codes an individual may be working under instead of understanding the process of individual interpretation. He goes on even to say that "there will always be private, individual, variant readings". Constantly throughout the text the author seems to undo his own argument. The Systematically distorted communication the author mentions is inherently part of interpretation and will always be present just as when he talks about language not having a "degree zero" and that it's representation of reality will always be skewed to a degree. He hints at the structure of a system when he says that reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language