O novo meio e os conteúdos

There is no such thing as a medium without content, for if it had no content, it would not be a as a medium. McLuhan (1964, pp. 23-4) cites the electric light as a hypothetical example of “pure information,” or a medium without content, but then aptly notes that its content is what it shines upon and illuminates. (Levinson, 1999: 2-3)

“The medium is the message” is no doubt McLuhan’s best-known aphorism. 35 …_ has been well understood in general, and aptly recognized as the flagstone in McLuhan’s path to understanding media. But, unsurprisingly, much of its subtlety and implication has been wildly misinterpreted as a manifesto “against” content, or that what is communicated does not matter at all. 35  McLuhan’s attempt to shift our focus from content to medium derived from his concern that content grabs our attention to the detriment of our understanding and even perception of the medium and all else around it much as the flood of sunlight on even cloudy days blinds us to t he stars that also inhabit our sky, and of which our sun is but a special, particular case. 36-37 In other words, the user is the content of the Internet – which, it turns out, is much what McLuhan went on to say, in a metaphoric sense, about media in general. 39

McLuhan’s examples of users as content – telephone and television (he also mentions radio) – are all electronic. Telephone, of course, presents a special case, because it is intrinsically interactive, as is online communication. But why distinguish television and radio as media in which the user is “sent”? The answer can only reside in the instantaneity of electronic communication, and the impact it has on the perceiver: whereas books and newspapers bring the world to us, clearly after the fact, radio and TV bring us to the world, to the very scene  of the action. 39-40

“ But sometimes that choice may be difficult to categorize. If I read a newspaper online, is the newspaper the content. .. are the words in the online stories… are the ideas expressed in the words… are they all? The answer suggests that not only do old media become the content of new media, but in so doing retain the older media that served as their content, which in turn retain their even older media as content, going back and back. . . to the oldest medium of all. 41