The medium is the massage

Marshall McLuhan's works and writings on communication and media brought about a new way of thinking about such subjects. It is said that "During his lifetime McLuhan did more than any other individual to interest the general public in communication study". Sparking interest in how people thought about the media and communication techniques made McLuhan a popular Media Theorist and writer. The fact that he thought electronic media would bring the world together as a "global village", prior to the World Wide Web even being invented, is quite astounding.
Reading the "medium is the massage" and listening to the recording were two completley different experiances and the differences back up what McLuhan was talking about. When I was reading it it was hard to stay focused, but when I listened to the recording, I found myself turning up the volume so that I wouldn't miss anything. In today's world, Communication is at a point that is quite new and exiting. With the internet, information and text is globally accessiable and boundries are collapsing. Digital media of today can be delivered in so many new and unique ways and regular printed text can almost be completley overridden by the digital age.

Analog and Digital Media differ greatly, but in the end both produce a wave that plays as a sound, however, Digital is much more complicated than Analog. Analog recordings take an analog wave from a microphone and put an analog wave directly on a tape and when that wave is read and amplified, a sound is produced. In digital media, the analog wave is sampled at an interval and those samples are turned into numbers that are stored digitally. TO produce a sound from digital media, the samples or numbers are turned into a voltage wave that approximates the original analog wave. Cassette tapes are analog and Cd's are digital.