Rethinking media history in modern China: the cases of lithography, slide shows, the telegraph, and motion pictures

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), whommany consider the founding father of media studies, first coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. Since then, this idea has been hammered into the heads of every first-year undergraduate student majoring in media studies. In Understanding Media, McLuhan states that “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.” In other words, the particular materiality of a medium not only constructs and creates a particular kind of message, but also affects how the message is received, understood, interpreted, and responded to. It can even be argued that every medium invokes human behaviors and thought patterns unique to that medium. Therefore, as far as communication studies and media history are concerned, a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. Although McLuhan’s proposition “the medium is the message” is widely accepted in communication studies, scholars in the field of media history still do not seem to have taken this idea seriously enough, as evidenced by their general preoccupation with content rather than the medium itself. For instance, some read through old newspapers to collect information relevant to a particular topic; others go through pictorial magazines in search of visual evidence as proof of particular facts. In both cases, the materiality of the medium itself, be it a newspaper or a pictorial magazine, is usually ignored. This problem is exacerbated by the wide use of digital technologies in research and further compounded by the need for libraries to protect the original materials in their collections bymaking them available only in digital format or reprints. Given the ease of using a computer to search for a particular word and the limited accessibility of original materials, researchers today often lack the opportunity to touch the actual medium itself. Consequently, there are many questions they cannot answer. What is the texture of the paper on which the words are printed?What is the exact original size of a slide or photograph?Was the movie in question shot on 16mm or 35mm film, with or without a sound track? And what about the print quality of a book, a pamphlet, or a newspaper? It is regrettable that most libraries in China do not collect audiovisual materials and that the few that do rarely make their collections available to the public. This too deprives scholars of a direct and unabridged experience with these media. Strictly speaking, any research on media history that fails to adequately consider the dimension of themedium itself does not qualify as media history. At best, such