Is the medium the message?

On Monday my seminar talked about the public sphere and what role the media play in creating a sense of it. My TA, Elysia, brought up a lot of interesting questions regarding our readings for this week, but what I found most compelling was her question of 'is the medium the message'? Also, she went on to ask what we thought was more important; the message itself, or how the message is conveyed -- the medium.

Our society has become completely dependent on our vision; what we see and what is shown to us shapes how we think, feel, and progress. Because of this visual dependency, I fully believe that regrettably, the medium is the message to us, and subsequently the medium has come to mean more than the message. A possible example of this would be Shelby Lee Adam's work. Even though Adams has made vocal statements about his pieces, claiming them to be an exploration of his heritage and Appalachian life, people still draw their conclusions from the images alone. Regardless of his words and written proposals, people see these unedited images of realistic life and immediately label them as exploitative.

Another example would be how over-the-top commercials have become. Instead of having a woman with nice, in-airbrushed hair stand beside a bottle of Pantene shampoo and simply tell us it works really well, we have to have gorgeous beauties prance around our television screens with nothing more than a bikini on, and hair more luminous than the sun itself. We've become susceptible to flashy, in-your-face visuals. Billboards plague our streets and bus stops, and every time we watch a program we're thrown at least 5 different ads every 10 to 15 minutes. Without the medium of a message we lose interest quickly, perhaps this is because of our dependency on visuals, or because we're incapable of paying attention to things that hold no visual medium. Either way, the medium has undoubtedly become more important than the message; now I wonder, is this a good thing?