Response to the McLuhan and Hall readings -- by Angela and Matthieu

In the McLuhan reading, what is examined is not the content of any given message, but the form of the content -- the medium. He uses the electric light as an example of a medium that has no content, or no message. He argues that the electric light is a "message of electric power in industry". He also argues that media determine the scale of the patterns of human interactions, referring to their properties of time and space. Finally, he also posits that the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions and concepts, but patterns of perception. Media is an extension of our human senses, which explains why artists, highly-tuned to sense perception, are well-conditioned to issues of technology. He uses the example of De Toqueville as having understood the effect of print and typography. In Hall's "Encoding/Decoding", the author describes communication as a complex structure in dominance, a process consisting of linked but distinctive moments -- production, circulation, distribution, consumption, and consequently reproduction, analogous to Marxist commodity production. This process has a set of social production relations which he refers to as media apparatuses. In the translation of stages in the process, there exists misunderstanding as a result of asymmetry in the encoding and decoding moments. Finally, he talks about 'naturalized codes' that demonstrate the degree of habituation when encoding and decoding are equivalent.

In our discussion, we agreed that the McLuhan excerpt discusses the medium and how technology shapes society. Hall is more concerned with content and meaning, and how a message flows through a process. This process affects the content, as the sometimes asymmetrical encoding and decoding processes exemplify. We discussed the following quote from the McLuhan reading: "For a society configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become "fixed charges" on the entire psychic life of the community." We found this interesting when approaching Hall's writings, because we found Hall's argument ("no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code" and "lack of equivalence" in the communication process of production/consumption") to be more revelatory of the way media operate. We found "entire psychic life of a community" to be too broad. It makes no mention of "dominant/negotiated/oppositional meanings and codes", which in our view is a better approach to understanding the "social bond" McLuhan alludes to, since media varies so much today. "Charges" these media may be, but in reality (at least in our opinion) they are not necessarily fixed because of the encoding/decoding, as opposed to commodities like oil and cotton. Finally, we discovered an interesting difference between the two readings: the first (McLuhan) was published in 1964, while Hall's was published in 2000. Could this perhaps shed light on why McLuhan's ideas are less developed in relation to the encoding/decoding process? We think so.

We arrived at the following question. Between the analyses of McLuhan and Hall, which one carries a greater impact/effect/consequence for our societies? In other words, should we give agency to the technological aspect (McLuhan, the medium is the message) or to the process of production/consumption and variable encoding/decoding (Hall)? Perhaps both approaches have some merit?