McLuhan’s goal in “The Medium Is the Message” is to redirect the focus of analysis from content towards the medium. He suggests that social and personal consequences of any new technology can only be understood by looking at the media that is created, whereas viewing the content does not pay adequate attention to the significant changes that are brought about as a result. McLuhan only focuses on content as intertwined with the medium, but does not go into the details of how the resulting message is coded to be understood by the audience. Stuart Hall, on the other hand, in his essay “Encoding/Decoding”, pays great attention to the process through which events become messages that are then encoded and decoded by the audience. He emphasizes that meanings are not naturally constructed, but are a result of a social order in which they are created and understood.
Looking at McLuhan’s argument through the framework of Stuart Hall, we can see how the process of encoding/decoding is also present in the ways that McLuhan sees the medium. While he does not approach his argument from a semiotic perspective, it is interesting to explore how Hall’s concepts can be applied to the formation of codes that are created by the “medium” as opposed to the content, which is Hall’s main focus in the article.
If, according to McLuhan, new media in itself can change society, then how is the process of encoding/decoding (which, in Hall’s view, is linked to the social order in which it takes place), altered by these changes, and how can the symmetry between “encoder – producer” and “decoder – receiver” be maintained if the medium keeps changing at such a rapid pace?
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