by Sripurna Majumdar
What is a medium? For Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher who is known for his studies on media theory, medium is an extension of ourselves. Be it television, radio, books — everything in the world we see around us is a form of media. And every medium holds a content which often receives our primary attention. Whether it is the content provided by the TV channel that we see or the information written in a book that we read— the content of the medium is the thing that engages us most. However, we often fail to notice that each media form has their own message, too. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan proposed that the media, not the content that they carry should be the focus of study. ‘The medium is the message,’ he says.
The content of a medium is easily grasped. But not so in the case of its character. Let us take the example of a movie. A movie like Inception plays on different levels of reality and distorts our conception of real time. Apart from its content, the movie as a medium plays with the conceptions of speed and time— radically changing our creative worldview. Here the character of a movie rather than content introduces changes of form and scale to human perceptions and creative imagination, a point often overlooked.
Further, McLuhan proposes that the content of any medium is always another medium. Thus speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print and so on. No medium is sacrosanct; each uses and discards portions from previously existing media forms. This eventually gives rise to a new medium which in turn introduces a new scale to human affairs. ‘Remediation’ describes the ability of media to borrow, absorb, replace or adapt to other media forms. Due to the constant interaction, media is a constantly evolving entity.
Now let's turn to electronic literature. Broadly speaking, it refers to any digitally born literature. Examples may include fanfictions, cellphone novels or insta poetry. In the case of electronic literatures, the concept of technology is as important as textuality. The way of production is as indispensable as the content, and thus becomes a space for textual, artistic and technological expressions and creativity.
In case of insta poetry, the overarching presence of the message of the medium becomes apparent. Its use of vintage filters, calligraphy, typewriters, hand typed pages and pre-digital objects gives rise to a sort of nostalgic aesthetic. Despite it being a digital form of literature, insta poetry evokes vibrant nostalgia for media that are now obsolete or outdated— a form of obsession for analogue media. This curious character of insta poetry of course has its own message. Instapoets ironically use the social media platform of Instagram to assert a so-called pristine, ink-and-paper notion of true poetry. This is an interesting feature of the current arena of electronic literature. The yearning for a form of media that is different from the electronic medium is apparent in the case of insta poetry. The attempt to fit the essence of hand-typed pages into the screen of gadgets is probably an essential attribute of the contemporary digital age. The medium, rather than the content, thus characterizes electronic literature, and more specifically, insta poetry.
References:
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The MIT Press, 1994.
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media, The MIT Press, 2000.
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