Television and Cybergs to Morphing

¶ … Television and Cybergs to Morphing and Meaning

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan provides the genre with the famous statement "The medium is the message," from which other theorists have since commented upon based upon his or her own view of the media culture. Specifically, this paper shall examine two theorists: Roland Barthes of France and Donna Haraway of the United States. While each of these theorists have a unique perspective with regard to the effect of media and mediums in modern society, they do share a commonality in thought. In examining the role of television in the modern age, Roland Barthes sees the medium as "the metaphor" in that the medium by which a message is shared defines the meaning of the message itself. Donna Haraway seems to take this perspective a step further into the era of the computer. To Haraway, the medium is not only a "metaphor," the receiver of the media actually morphs into the medium itself. At first the two theorists seem incompatible, Barthes did not talk of cyborgs or Haraway describes media and its connection to feminist thought. However, the two are similar in that each finds the medium by which the message is sent to be powerful in and of itself. Powerful enough for Barthes for the medium to have an effect on the media's meaning; powerful enough for Haraway for the medium to become a part of the media's meaning and the recipient's identity.

According to Barthes, his theories seem to support the initial contention that "the medium is the message" because to him, the medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association with a particular sign (Barthes). For example, in the process of reading, the medium requires the receiver of the message to interpret and to analyze. As a result of the didactic and interactive thought process required in the action of reading or by which the message is conveyed, the media itself takes on a greater, more poignant meaning with the meaning being enhanced by the actual mode of its delivery. In contrast, Barthes explained that the television is a merely passive activity by which the recipient of the message does not interact; instead, the recipient is a passive observer. The role of the recipient as a passive observer limits the impact that the media and, hence, the media can actually have. In such a sense, the medium is a metaphor for how much meaning one might be able to uncover in a given message. If the medium is one requiring intellectual thought and inquiry, then the media is likely to be interpreted as such; likewise, in the case of television, the corollary holds true.

Donna Haraway takes the "medium as the message" statement a few steps further. There is no denying that she sees a powerful connection between the medium and the message. Perhaps, she takes this message a bit too far or a bit too fast (It may just be that I'm not willing to accept her cyborg theory since I'm just beginning to understand the meaning of a cyborg). Specifically, when Haraway wears the hat of media theorist, she sets forth the forward-thinking, modern, and somewhat controversial statement that human beings are so closely linked to the mediums of today that we are actually morphing into half cyborg-half human creatures given our interconnectedness with the medium of computers themselves and their intrustion and/or interconnectedness to our lives: "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (Haraway 15a0). Haraway continues to define A cyborg as a: cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, and a creature of both fiction and lived social reality.