[00:00.00]Throughout most of human history, a society’s culture was defined and communicated primarily through the family. [00:07.57]Early cultures communicated their values and beliefs to their children by oral tradition—word of mouth. [00:14.20]Parents and grandparents had the job of passing on the culture’s history and traditions. [00:19.49] The older members of the family were storytellers and historians—our “cultural narrators.”
[00:25.31]The cultural narrator was valued for his or her wisdom and experience. [00:29.80]The cultural narrator helped to sustain the society through the preservation of vital cultural information. [00:37.25]Until the mid-twentieth century, the family was the medium by which culture was passed along.
[00:43.34]Since the 1950s, however, the role of the cultural narrator has been taken over by television. [00:50.14]What I mean is, the family storytellers have been replaced by television shows that tell us who we are, what we need, how we should speak, and what we should believe in.
[01:00.63]In the sixties and seventies, as television became more a part of North American life, several writers and philosophers began to study what was going on. [01:10.93]One of the most creative minds to explore this issue was Marshall McLuhan.
[01:16.09]McLuhan studied English literature in his native Canada and in England, and then taught at several universities in the United States. [01:24.36]As a Canadian scholar teaching in the U. S., McLuhan realized that he didn’t understand his American students. [01:32.18]He couldn’t figure out their interests and values, why they spoke and acted and felt the way they did. [01:38.71]So, he set out to learn more about the values of his students by studying their popular culture: the movies, television shows, music, pastimes—all the things that young Americans pursued in their leisure time.
[01:53.63]McLuhan became convinced that electronic media played a significant role and that the media were responsible for the attitudes and values of his students. [02:04.65]In fact, he went beyond his immediate interest in his own students to theorize that the media had prompted most of the social changes in Western culture. [02:15.08]McLuhan’s ideas soon made him the leading cultural critic and media theorist of his time.
[02:22.02]McLuhan’s ideas gained attention worldwide. [02:25.95]He wrote several books about the effect of media on human development, including this one, The Medium is the Message, which is the book you’ll be reading next in this course.
[02:37.57]The Medium is the Message is McLuhan’s most influential book. [02:42.25]Although it was first published more than thirty years ago, it remains an important classic in the field of communications. [02:49.61]It’s a book—and an idea—that you’ll come back to over and over again, and reading it will probably change your view of how we communicate.
[03:00.25]Why is it such an important book? [03:03.28]Well, you’ve probably heard the expression, “The medium is the message” because it’s entered our vocabulary. [03:10.07]What McLuhan meant by this statement was that how people learn—the medium—is more important than what they learn—the message. [03:19.50] In other words, the method of communicating information has more influence on the public than the information itself. [03:27.29] Communication is culture, and culture is communication.
[03:32.82]McLuhan didn’t consider himself a critic of the media in the sense of condemning it. [03:38.28]He wasn’t interested in deciding whether television was good or bad. [03:42.10]He just wanted people to understand how it affected them so they could make their own informed decisions about it. [03:49.06]We’re just beginning to understand the ways that the media have affected our culture. [03:54.99]Sociologists, psychologists, media ecologists—people in a multitude of fields are trying to explain the relationships among media, values, and behavior.
[04:06.94]Is television good or bad for us? Does television cause human behavior, or merely record it? [04:15.19]This question is of particular interest to researchers who study the effects of television—especially television violence—on children’s behavior. [04:25.11]And now that television is starting to merge with other electronic media, like the Internet, there are a growing number of issues and new questions calling for informed thinking about the relationship of the media to human development.
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