Response to McLuhan and Hall by Group 6 (Kevin, Duy, Ben, Scott)

Summary:

The typical definition is that medium delivers or communicates the message. Marshall McLuhan argues that the medium itself is the message and this message is the scale of change or pace or pattern that that medium introduces to the human affairs. The characteristic of all media is that the content of any medium is always another medium. In the second reading, Stewart Hall said that encoding and decoding are related to each other, and the two are determinate moments with the communicative process as a whole. His argument is that the sender takes the receiver into account when he encodes the message. Signs are employed in encoding, and could be decoded in many different ways. Analysis of the message in the decoding process makes use of denotation and connotation, as well as dominant, professional, negotiated, or oppositional codes.

Discussion:

According to Marshall McLuhan's notion that the content of any medium is always another medium, it is interesting that our actual process of thought itself is a medium, probably the absolute and eventual one. McLuhan also talks about the electric media which had a lot in common with the internet even though he wrote this essay in 1964. Marshall McLuhan is of the opinion that only the serious artist is capable of 'encountering technology with impunity'�; however, he is mistaken, as serious artists are not the only experts aware of the changes in sense perception. Part of development of technology involves understanding these changes. Study of the effects on the population also involves this understanding. Many professions deal with these. The combination of denotation and connotation creates a better understanding of the message being conveyed. Denotation works on the basics of the message and connotation is mainly to enrich and define more clearly the essence of an idea. Stuart Hall's mention of the near-universal signs which are interpreted similarly by many people in a similar way could be compared to Carl Jung's idea of the universal unconsciousness and universal symbols; the virtual unconscious interpretations of symbols may be due to preprogrammed rules.

Question:

How does sensory input play a role in interpreting signs / symbols?