Communication - 1 a transmitting 2 a) a giving or
exchanging of information, messages, etc.
b) a message, letter, etc. 3 a means of communicating 1
The ways in which humans communicate and the way these media affect humans are key factors in shaping our existence. Marshall McLuhan's phrase "the medium is the message" has now become a common idiom, but is important concept to apply to media, because form can dictate function. As McLuhan noticed of railroads in Understanding Media,
The railway did
not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society,
but it accelerated and
enlarged the
scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities
and new kinds of work and leisure.
This happened
whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment,
and is quite independent of the
freight or content
of the railway medium. (McLuhan, 8)
In a nutshell, what McLuhan suggests is that technologies themselves shape culture, regardless what the content of the medium is. The railroad is a means of communicating; whether it carries people or cattle, it connects cities together, it speeds up transportation, it's dependent on certain types of fuel, etc. These factors are what impacts society's relationship to the railroad technology. A more striking example McLuhan gives is found in the electric light. For what is the content of electricity? "The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it is, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name" (McLuhan, 8).
How then, have different communication technologies, these ways of transmitting information, shaped human existence, and how will they shape human existence? Human communication spans thousands of years, and to study this history is arduous. Yet we do have modern parallels of progress. The music industry is in many ways a condensed version of this communication history. The recorded music industry is less than a century old; within the past hundred years it has paralleled the communications shifts from oral culture to literate culture to the information age, and in a fraction of the time that the spoken word changed to written and eventually, hypertext.
The goal of these texts is to explore the future
of the music industry by studying how it has paralleled other information
technologies in the past and present. If the reader acknowledges that the
medium is the message, then the effects of media form are applicable to
more than the scope this paper affords.