The Medium is the Mess-iah
Abstract
Playing with Marshall McLuhan’s play on his famous saying “the medium is the message”, when he substituted the words massage, mass age, and mess age for message, I formulated the one-liner ‘the medium is the mess-iah’. I will explain what McLuhan meant by a medium and also how the term messiah arose. I will then address how the one-liner, the medium is the mess-iah provides insights into the nature of digital media in general; Steve Jobs’ development of the Apple product line and the devotion of its users; and the religious and messianic belief of the advocates of the technological Singularity.
Downloads
References
Austin, E. G. 2011. “Steve Jobs’s legacy: With Apple, the medium made the message.” Economist: October 11, 2011.
Braga, Adriana and Robert K. Logan. 2017. “The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes: Limits to Artificial Intelligence.” MDPI Information 8, 156-77.
Croak, James. 2015. “Fear of a God, Redux.” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 498-99.
de Kerchove, Derrick. 2009. Preface in Network, Networking as Art by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Harris, Sam. 2015. “Can We Avoid a Digital Apocalypse?” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 408-11.
Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking Books.
Levinson, Paul. 2001. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge.
Lisi, Anthony Garrett. 2015. “I, for One, Welcome our Machine Overlords.” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 22-24.
Martin-Barbero, Jesus. 1997. “Mass Media as a Site of Resacralization of Contemporary Cultures.” In S. Hoover and K. Lundby (eds) Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.
McCorduck, Pamela. 2015. “An Epochal Human Event.” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 51-53.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw Hill.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1969. Counterblast. Toronto: McLelland and Steward.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1980. “Living at the speed of light.” Maclean's Magazine.
McLuhan, Marshall with Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the massage: An inventory of effects. New York: Random House.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. 1972. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Toronto: Longman Canada.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Harley Parker. 1968. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper and Row
Paul, Gregory. 2015. “What will AI’s Think of Us.” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 391-93.
Robinson, Brett T, 2013. Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs. Waco TX: Baylor University Press.
Tipler, Frank. 2015. “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em.” In John Brockman (ed) What to Think about Machines that Think. New York: Harper Perennial, 17-18.
