21.《理解媒介》Understanding the medium

The book we're talking about today is called Understanding Media. Its author, McLuhan, is a great scholar in the field of communication, roughly the equivalent of Stephen Hawking in the world of physics. McLuhan's most profound insight is in five words: "The medium is the message".
What McLuhan wants to tell us is that the medium, as a means of disseminating information, determines not only the style of the message, but also its content. In other words, once the medium has changed, the message has changed. A video played in a cinema, a video played on the TV at home, a video played on a mobile phone, is pressed into a different species. Today, McLuhan's theories are not new, but a few decades ago, the American communication community did not accept his ideas at all, and they called McLuhan a magician and a fraud.
The greatest value of McLuhan's theory, as we know, is that it reverses the relationship between content and form.
In the past, if we were asked which influenced us more, form or content, most people would choose content, and that's what the American communication community thought. So, scholars in those days liked to study how content influenced audiences. For example, after watching a news story, are teenagers more significantly violent? This is the classic communication science question.
Such studies, however, were short-lived and there was no way to build a disciplinary theory at a higher level.
Communication science was then faced with a crisis; what was the point of the discipline?
It was at this point that McLuhan emerged with his media theory. McLuhan exclaimed: the medium is the message! -- the medium itself is the real valuable message! In Understanding the Medium, he gives the example of the human being as the watchdog, the form of the medium as the thief, and the content as a tasty piece of meat. The thief throws a piece of meat away to distract attention, which is why people focus on the content and ignore the form.
But in reality, content brings only a short-term shift; form brings long-term, macro changes. For example, the advent of the printing press led to the development of rational civilisation in the West; the advent of television led to a dramatic shift in the relationship between people and society. It is form, not content, that dominates all this.
McLuhan's theories, which fundamentally overturned the communication science of the past, found the foundation for communication science.
Scholars at the time did not accept McLuhan's theories, in fact, because his ideas were so far ahead of their time. So, looking at it today, we get the impression that the theory works well and is particularly strong in its explanations. Because we live in the age of the Internet. The Internet is a medium, a medium that is profoundly changing human society.
译文：
今天要聊的这本书叫《理解媒介》。它的作者麦克卢汉是一位传播学领域里的大神级的学者，地位大约相当于物理学界里的霍金。麦克卢汉最深刻的洞见，就是五个字：“媒介即信息”。
麦克卢汉想告诉我们的是：媒介作为信息传播的一种手段，不仅决定了信息的样式，也决定了信息的内容。换句话说，一旦媒介变了，信息就变了。在电影院里播放的视频，在家里电视上播放的视频，在手机上播放视频，压根就是不同的物种。今天，麦克卢汉的理论已经不新鲜了，但是在几十年前，美国传播学界根本不接受他的观点，他们骂麦克卢汉是神棍，是骗子。
我们知道，麦克卢汉的理论最大的价值，就是颠覆了内容和形式的关系。
过去，如果问形式和内容哪个对我们的影响更大，大部分人都会选内容，美国的传播学界也是这么想的。所以，那个时候的学者喜欢研究内容如何影响受众。比如，看了一则新闻之后，青少年的暴力倾向是不是更显著了？这就是典型传播学问题。
但是，这样的研究，时效很短，也没办法从更高层次建立学科理论。
于是，传播学就面临着一个危机，这个学科有什么意义呢？
就在这时，麦克卢汉带着他的媒介理论横空出世。麦克卢汉大声疾呼：媒介即讯息！——媒介本身才是真正有价值的讯息！在《理解媒介》里，他举了一个例子，人就像看门狗，媒介形式就像小偷，内容就是一块美味的肉。小偷为了转移注意力，扔了一块肉，所以人们才只关注内容，忽略了形式。
但实际上，内容带来的只是短期的转变，形式会带来长期的、宏观的变化。比如，印刷术出现之后，西方理性文明发展；电视出现之后，人和社会的关系也发生了巨大转变。主导这一切的是形式，而不是内容。
麦克卢汉的理论，从根本上颠覆了过去的传播学，为传播学找到了立身之本。
当时的学者不接受麦克卢汉的理论，其实就是因为他的想法太超前了。所以，今天来看，我们就会觉得，这个理论很好用，解释力度特别强。因为我们生活在互联网时代。互联网就是一种媒介，一种正在深刻改变人类社会的媒介。