Of Medium and Message

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan coined the term, "the medium is the message." McLuhan was a professor of English Literature, critic and scholar, but much of his life's work had to do with the study of how we communicate in the context of a post-modern multi media world. He also coined the term, "global Village" recognizing that, even as early as the 1960's, electronic multi-media would begin bridging the socio-economic and cultural gaps in our world. He developed this theory well before computers as we now know them existed; before e-mail; Facebook; Twitter; digital video; and digital cellular and satellite communications. McLuhan's primary hypothesis concerning media was that the message that is communicated is profoundly affected by the means by which it is communicated....We know, for example, that e-mails may be understood quite differently as compared to a spoken conversation; remote live video communicates far differently compared to still photographs; poetry different from prose. The medium is the message.

I have marveled at the television media's coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. I must say that I have a broad ambivalence regarding the so-called news media, but in this case things seem somehow different. A young doctor was seen on camera weeping at the magnitude of his task ahead. He told NBC's Nancy Sniderman that this event had changed his life forever. She asked him if he thought he would be able to continue...He replied that he would stay until all was done...We saw a young surgeon telling a mother that her six year old daughter's leg must be amputated or else she would die....the mother wailed, tears streaming down her face of ebony, but was soon consoled by her injured daughter, her husband and this young surgeon from Raleigh North Carolina...similar tears on her white face; then we saw a woman who had been trapped in rubble for six days, her husband keeping vigil until he heard her small voice...three hours later she was rescued by fire-fighters from Los Angeles...as she lay on the gurney, she sang hymns of praise; another NBC reporter who lived thirteen years in Haiti as a child tracked down her nurse to make sure she was alive....both were unable to speak upon finding each other.

The medium is the message. Where the medium is compassion, then the message is God's love incarnate...alive and real....by air and land and sea...and this love ramifies throughout the global village, the commonweal of humankind, in which we now see and hear and know of our astounding and irrevocable interdependence...we have seen it in the flesh....and we will continue to see it, this intimacy of the global human community, in all aspects of our lives...our lives that shape and are shaped by many other lives...Our tears this day, our common ground and our shared humanity....Where there is compassion, even in the midst of unthinkable tragedy, there is God's love. The medium: compassion; the message: Love alive.