What does McLuhan say?

For inspiration regarding my thoughts on how I feel about art and photography, within the context of communications, I've looked to Marshall McLuhan (and many many others).

McLuhan made a fervent case regarding the theory that 'the medium is the message' as explained in his 1964 book, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'. He suggested that it is not the content in media that affects people; it is the existence of the medium itself. For instance, society is more affected by the fact of having television than what is actually being broadcast.

To play on and expand those groundbreaking ideas (of which I can't even scratch the surface of here) I agree that the existence of photography and photographs have had a profound affect on the way that we live our lives and contextualize the world around us, but I'd like to take his discussion over content a few steps further-- into our current technological era. What I am trying to accomplish and understand photographically through my own work and others' goes far beyond the mere existence of the medium itself. In a world where we are now bombarded with imagery in so many forms, I believe that content, or how we view content, has had to evolve to rise through the medium it is presented with. Also, the message must stand out from the medium for the viewer or the image itself may simply be bypassed. We are in an era of visual abundance. How do we image makers get our photos to stand out?

For example, a photograph of a person grieving in front of a bombed out building is going to have some sort of impact on the viewer (not to say that every viewer would be impacted the same way, if at all)- do you think that impact would be different if the viewer saw the image in a digital form on a website or if they saw it in a newspaper? The two formats are very different forms of media yet the content in the photograph does not change. The viewer isn't necessarily being affected as much by what medium they are viewing it with as much as the impact of the content itself.

One could certainly argue in McLuhan's favor that the medium does bear impact in the above example. The internet has provided a platform for almost instantaneous consumption of images/data. The picture of the person grieving may have been uploaded moments after the incident happened bearing a completely different impact on the viewer than the delayed newspaper photo... because by the time the paper publishes that photo, the viewer may have already seen versions of the image on the internet, on television thrice and from different angles... perhaps the viewer is already desensitized to the event and the photo content at that stage bears no impact and simply gets bypassed. If that's the case, the medium does indeed have more significance than the content.

We image makers/photographers can learn from Mr. McLuhan's theory. We need to really understand different media conduits and their context in order to maximize our ability to have our photos/messages stand out-- through the medium. The message has to be more than the medium.