Content vs. Medium / Tree of Codes
In our class module this week, we were introduced to Marshall McLuhan:
McLuhan (1911-1980) was, among other things, a communication theorist. In his work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he proposed that the medium of a message affects society in profound ways, and that the content of the message is of minimal importance. He uses the example of the light bulb: a light bulb is a medium without content, and yet it has had a major impact on our society. I couldn’t argue with the light bulb example, but I immediately (and strongly) disagreed with his assertion that medium was more important than content in the example of literature. For example, if I’m reading the Sartorialist, the most important thing to me is the photographs. Whether I’m reading it in hard copy or on Scott Shuman’s blog doesn’t really matter to me. Sure, on the blog there’s more content, and there are (many) additional comments, but what I’m really after are the photos.
However, a friend showed me a book last night that has made me rethink my stance. Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a book called Tree of Codes. He “wrote” the book by taking an English language copy of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and literally cutting out words to create his own narrative. The effect is stunning: while the reader is reading the text on the top-most page, he/she can glimpse the coming text through the holes in the page (and of course, there’s no rule to say that the reader can’t opt to read all visible text). In this instance, the medium is undoubtedly more important than the content: an electronic copy of this would be disappointing, to say the least. If Safran Foer had used a different version of The Street of Crocodiles, the reader would have a different visual experience. Had the author decided to erase words, or black them out instead of cutting, the reader’s experience would be very much altered.
This video explains how Tree of Codes was made:
So, in this case, I have been suitably chastised. 🙂 But I stand by my assertion that usually, or often, content is more important than medium in literature. What do you think? Thanks to Marty for writing the blog entry that got me thinking about this.
Jess, I agree that content is generally more important than medium when it comes to literature. The main problem I have with McLuhan’s assertion is that if medium is most important, the movies “The Notebook” and “It” should have more in common with each other than their perspective books and I have a hard time believing this despite any overarching differences between film and literature.
Interestingly, my immediate reaction to Tree of Codes was to classify it as art, which it is not (at least not primarily). I think I may have reacted this way because I could not immediately identify the medium as something which I recognized or could easily categorize, and this affected my overall impression of what the content might be. I still have trouble getting on board with McLuhan completely, since the story is ultimately housed in the book’s content (i.e. there would be no story without content, regardless of the medium), but your example has definitely made me more aware of how I use medium to frame content, which undoubtedly has an effect on how I perceive the content itself.
seanna
17 Jul 11 at 21:21