McLuhan Blog

Today, as everyone knows, was the honors conference. All of us were to attend five of the environment events to fulfill our merit fellowship credit. While I was sitting through these lectures and presentations, this class kept creeping into my mind. The theme for the conference was the environment and I found many of the lectures that I attended interesting and informative of things I had no previously known.

I related the things being discussed to McLuhan’s theory of the medium being the message. All the ways of getting the information across whether it was through a PowerPoint, video clips, pictures, etc was the medium used. The content was the information being presented to us but the real message was what we’re going to do with the information presented.
I was present at the feral cats presentation to learn about different ways that feral cats are being helped and ways the population of these feral cats is being decreased without killing or euthanizing the cats. The content of the presentation was the information about the shelters and clipping of the cat’s ears to protect them from the government. The cat’s ears are clipped once they are vaccinated and neutered. The clipping allows for the community to be safer and for the cats to stay well protected.

Aside from that, the message the really came across to many of us in the room was that these cats need help. The information being presented about how I could help and what I could do wasn’t the true message at all. The message was what I was going to do now that I know the information that the lecturer had given.

To think that this entire conference would not have been nearly as successful without the use of the media that helped to present the content and allowed us to interpret our own message from it. Every lecture I was present at had some form of media being use to display their information.

Also using McLuhan’s theory, the media used today (mainly computers) would be considered a “hot” medium because of the amount of information that they presented to their target audience. The brain was not used to interpret any of the information shown but rather to absorb and listen to the different presentations with minimal effort.

Overall, the conference was nice and very informative on what we can do to help change the environment Having McLuhan’s theory in my head all day allowed for me to really see what we’ve been discussing throughout the semester about media in our everyday lives and how it can have a positive effect on our culture.