Teaching the Medium Theory

Communication can happen in many ways. Through songs, words, paintings, icons, etc. These are all ways of conveying something to the viewer/reader. They are called the mediums. Theorists look a this and say that the way that the message is displayed affects the way the medium is received. 

Marshall McLuhan is one of the theorists who talks about the medium being the message. To explain theory he compares a light bulb to a newspaper. They are both mediums but in very different ways. The light bulb is a medium without a message. It is there to service people with light. When comparing this medium with a newspaper the content is different. Newspapers have inside articles, the TV has programs, and the phone has content/apps. 

Sources:

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Hot and Cold Media

Marshall McLuhan’s theory builds into this concept of hot and cold media. Media such as movies and newspapers are hot forms of media and cold media would be described as anything that needs interaction such as telephones and WhatsApp as an example. We can understand more about the medium being the message when we look at a phone holding the news. The medium is the phone but the medium is also the news on the phone. This therefore means that “The content of any Medium is always another medium” ( Marshall McLuhan).

When we look at the pandemic we can see that the media in which information was received changed hugely. Simple everyday tasks and events suddenly became a problem and the medium needed to be changed in order not to break Covid rules. For example, schooling transferred to Zoom ( a professional video calling system), and therefore children were learning from their teachers online. Work-life became a problem because of social distancing. People had to work from home and use hot media like Zoom, telephone calls, and WhatsApp to communicate.

As I was a nursery teacher when the pandemic hit I think of how it affected my way of sending information effectively with the restrictions. I had to teach children on Zoom about religion and I found it challenging to come up with different effective mediums. As we were not all together where ideally I would put music on, dress up, and do some acting I had to come up with other ideas for the children to learn. One difficulty I encountered while I was teaching was having to redirect the children’s attention away from watching their TV! Some ideas I had included sharing videos online, playing music, using the online whiteboard, and also sending stuff by email for the children to print out before the class like worksheets.

All in all, I found this challenging but also rewarding. We see here that the medium had to be changed and adapted to life during the pandemic.