The medium is the message. The phrase was coined by philosopher Marshall McLuhan decades back to push us to think about the various tools of expression around us — the technology through which ideas are conveyed — as more than just neutral delivery devices. The medium itself “does something to people,” McLuhan wrote.
“It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were.” When new advances in media increase the pace and scale of all of it, that leads to a “general roughing up” as he termed it.
This was long before the internet and newsletters and social media were even a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye, but his words have been borne out. Who hasn’t felt more than a bit knocked around in the last few years? For nearly a century, movies were one of the most powerful mediums around, and while they’ve lost cultural capital in the last decade, it’s dispiriting to contemplate how many people who make films — be they executives or creatives — are helping to hasten that irrelevance. Maybe you think I’m referring to artificial intelligence.
That’s a real concern. But I’m also thinking about a blandification that has become all too pervasive. While doing press last week to promote the big-budget follow-up to “Twister,” the 1996 disaster movie about scientists and adrenaline-seeking tornado chasers, director Lee Isaac Chung to CNN why not a single character in the movie says the words “clima.