Page 88 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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activities they enable in ‘virtual’ space are dependent on massive material
changes in real space, including the laying of cables and a vast infrastructure
and global industry that makes great demands on human labour and material
resources.
The conventional model of media would not include museums because their
traditional emphasis on original objects, as opposed to representations, limits
circulation (although touring exhibitions do increasingly circulate numerous
objects, the fragility, size or value of many artefacts means that they remain
fixed in one location). Media are thought of as technologies of communication
(such as print, telegraphy, television, film), as distinct from technologies used
for other purposes (carpets as a technology, or food technology) (Angus 1998).
That model of media views media technologies as purely oriented toward the
movement or broadcast of messages or media content from transmitters to
receivers. It is rejected by some of the major theorists of media. They emphasize
the ways in which media become a material means by which people experience
the world. Writing in the 1950s, Harold Innis conceived of the gap between
sender (or transmitter) and receiver in terms of temporality as well as spatiality,
so that a statue, without moving an inch, communicates from one historical
moment to another, while a letter on paper, which is relatively ephemeral but
mobile, communicates across space. Through this time/space distinction, Innis
mapped the physical characteristics of media onto different kinds of social
organization. Each medium has a ‘material bias’, which includes its orientation
toward spatial or temporal transmission, and in this way, the media of a given
society set limits on what can be experienced and how it is experienced (Angus
1998).
Instead of presuming that the medium simply moves a message from sender
to receiver, Innis saw its capacity to communicate as dependent on its material
nature and as shaping of social institutions and practices. In his 1964 book
Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan developed Innis’s notion of ‘material
bias’. He used examples which are not usually understood as media at all, such
as the electric light and the railway. His phrase ‘the medium is the message’
implied that the significance of any new medium was not the uses to which it
was put or the content but the ‘change of scale or pace or pattern that it
introduces into human affairs’ (McLuhan 2002: 8). For McLuhan this was the
‘content’ of the medium. He opposed those who saw technologies as having no
character or nature of their own. David Sarnoff, chair of RCA, the company
that introduced television to North America, claimed that, ‘The products of
modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used
that determines their value’. McLuhan responded with the suggestion that we
replace the phrase ‘products of modern science’ with ‘apple pie’, ‘smallpox
virus’, or ‘firearms’, to get a sense of the ludicrousness of the statement (2002: