The Medium is the Message The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was famous for his assertion

that what was important about media was not their content but the way they transformed our environment and in turn how people behave. For McLuhan the content of any medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. The novelist Thomas Wolfe summarizes McLuhan s project thus: McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new technologies of the electronic age, notably television, radio, the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. A new environment: they are not merely added to some basic human environment . . . They radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. (Wolfe 1965) This way of thinking about media has been much ignored by British Media Studies based, as it is, on a way of examining media in terms of texts and discourse inherited from Raymond Williams. The anthropologist Sherry Turkle s work can be understood as broadly McLuhanite when she writes: How were computers changing us as people? My colleagues often objected, insisting that computers were just tools. But I was certain that the just in that sentence was deceiving. We are shaped by our tools. And now, the computer, a machine on the border of becoming a mind, was changing and shaping us. As an anthropologist who studies media she uses research methods such as interviews and participant observations to discover how people use media. This form of research enables researchers to discover more subjective perspectives on how people use and feel about media. In this workshop you are going to undertake some similar ethnographic work by both interviewing and being interviewed by a colleague about your media use. You will then briefly report your findings back to the class. When interviewing we are looking to uncover qualitative information about how people use media and how they understand their use of media. In this interview we want you to try and discover how your colleagues use media and what they think and feel about this media use. You will find some excerpts of Turkle s latest book in your module handbook which will give you an idea of the kind of phenomenon we want you to report on. Turkle s most recent book Alone Together is at odds with her previous research on the area as instead of highlighting the liberating potentials of new media she reveals some problematic examples related to its use. Some examples of the kind of thing you might want to ask about: How have developments in media technology altered your environment? Have these alterations led to you changing the way you behave?

How do you feel about these changes? Do you feel nostalgic for times prior to the current media you use? Do you develop coping mechanisms related to media use? Has your perception of space and time been transformed by media? How has your experience of culture changed (e.g. image, text, sound, consumption)? What values and emotions do you connect with your media use? It is the interviewers task to guide the interviewee in giving the kind of information they want as well as keeping notes of what is revealed. Once you have completed your interviews you will be asked to briefly report your findings back to the class. This will involve you interpreting what you have been told. We also strongly advise that you also write up the results of your interview as part of your reflective journal.