Journal 6 Cooper Tesch

Medium is a message within itself. It is an important part of the message that we are trying to convey. To me if I received a letter in the mail from a friend I would take that as a message of deep caring. Today we don’t mail letters as much seeing as we can text or call someone, but to receive a letter in the mail from a friend shows that they put time and effort into sending you something they created so along with the message they enclosed inside the medium also reflects the message of deep caring. This goes for all types of mediums; I believe it’s a way of communicating another feeling or meaning aside from the actual message part. The part in the video where they’re talking about the importance of the medium like when writing was invented to shift from oral communication and the visual on screen of a message in a bottle, these helped me reach my conclusion of what I feel medium is and what it does. McLuhan makes not just emotional but physical connections with the medium, where our importance on a certain sense has changed over time such as oral tradition shifting to written taking our primary focus off listening and shifting it to an emphasis on sight. This shift has happened again and again has technology has advanced to where we get messages from reading or speaking with him arguing its created some sort of global village.

Your medium you choose to convey your message is in a broader sense your genre. Your medium is social media and your genre is either twitter or facebook or tumblr. Depending on your audience determines what kind of medium you should use to convey your message to them whether it be a powerpoint for a business presentation or a video for kids. A lot of the knowledge we’ve gathered throughout humanity’s existence exists in mostly written form now but somethings are still in a different medium such as oral tales or history. All types of medium have a purpose depending on the message you are trying to convey, a hand-written letter to convey that you care or an email to serve the purpose of communicating with your business partners.