Introduction

Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.

This is the second essay.

Essay

We and our media co-evolve, becoming one system.

Many people cite Marshall McLuhan’s saying, “The medium is the message.”

His dictum is quoted more often that the work from which it sprang is read. In that book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he develops a sophisticated and nuanced definition of “medium.” A key to understanding what McLuhan means by “medium” lies in coming to grips with the subtitle of the book, “The Extensions of Man.” McLuhan’s opening paragraph points the way, and is worth reading again:

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1964), 7.).

Here he defines a medium as a human extension. So for example, a handgun is a medium of violence, because as an extension of a fist, it heightens a person’s ability to strike another person. Likewise, a wheelchair is a medium of locomotion, because as an extension of a person’s legs, it augments that person’s ability to move. One could make the same kind of observation about Mark McGwire’s bat, Cal Ripken’s baseball glove, Tiger Woods’ nine iron or Sarah McLachlan’s guitar.

McLuhan’s point that a medium is a human extension implies that the human and the medium through which a human communicates form a system. This insight explains why one should not lean on a person’s wheelchair as if it were a piece of furniture. For the person who can walk, the device may be nothing more than a chair. But for the person who extends his or her mobility through the wheelchair, the device is wheels, embodying personal mobility and expression in the same way the family car may symbolize mobility and freedom for the restless teenager.

So if a medium is a human extension, and if the human and the medium in use form a system, then one can and should look at the system. One observes the behavior, measures the activity and describes the changes of the system, not just the human using the medium, in order to understand the communications phenomena in question.

From this observation that a person and the medium of communication form a system, one can take the next step and apply the insights and questions of systems to the interaction of the person and the medium. For example, several months ago I was listening to my step-daughter, a college student, talk about her friends and their relationships at school. She mentioned that they kept in touch when they were apart by writing letters. When she said something like, “So I wrote Emily about what kind of furniture we wanted for our apartment next year,” she supplemented her comment with a gesture depicting the act of writing. She gesture was to hold both hands palms down in front of her and wiggle her fingers in imitation of typing on a keyboard. For her, writing had become sending e-mail and the gesture to depict the medium of the letter had become keyboarding, not handwriting.

So if one were to study the system of letter-writing among college students, one would need to examine how students and computers and e-mail and the Internet work together and influence one another as a system.

Systems are not static. They are fluid, in motion, in evolution. For example, professional baseball exhibits the characteristics of a system. One only has to watch the highlights on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight to see how the increasing size and better conditioning of players has led to an increase in home runs. Greater offense changes the balance of the game; run production goes up; people like watching offense; owners build hitters’ ballparks; and more home runs get hit. Some critics contend the system is out of balance. But others point to the emergence of equally large and strong pitchers who can routinely through fastballs between 95 and 100 miles per hour rather than 90 to 95 miles per hour. The critics assert that this trend will lead to a rebalancing between offense and defense over time. This is the behavior of a system seeking dynamic, not static, equilibrium.

A person and his or her chosen forms of communication form a system. Changes in the available forms of communication lead to changes in the activity of the system. Thus newspaper publishers considered the rise of television as a challenge to the system of news delivery in print. Network television, in turn, eyes the growth of the Web and its ubiquitous power to customize content as a threat to the hegemony of the networks.

Again, McLuhan’s notion of the medium as a human extension offers an insight. When one considers a person and the means, the media, that person chooses to use to engage the news of the day, one is considering the behavior of a system. This insight underlies the premise of “Mass Media Technology and Bundling Behavior: A Ludenic Perspective.” The authors begin by “…assuming the people are in command [of their media use], that viewing behavior may be multi-faceted, perhaps multi-medial” (Wilma Crumley, Michael Stricklin and Kewis Zager, “Mass Media Technology and Bundling Behavior: A Ludenic Perspective,” (paper presented at the Eastern Communication Association Symposium on the Play Theory of Mass Communication, Ocean Park, Maryland, 24-26 April 1980), 2.). This assumption helps one begin to understand how a person engages the news, or any medium, by asking how a person uses the various media at hand and how those media influence the behavior of the person. One cannot extract or abstract the one from the other.

This insight has ramifications for studying how people make use of a web site. While they may be reading in a way akin to reading a book, the web site as a tool, with its hyperlinks, changes the system. Connections exist explicitly through those hyperlinks. They are readily apparent and traveled by the user. Thus the behavior of the person using a web site may be different from a person reading a book. One can question how a person chooses to make a path through a site, to organize the content by selecting the points of attention that form the path.

As one system, the person, the media and the messages constitute an object worthy of observation. From those observations, one can gain insights into how people, media and messages co-evolve. These insights may enable professional communicators to design and support media more responsive to the needs of the people who use them.

We and our media co-evolve, becoming one system.