The Medium is the Message

When cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey's fans complained that Indian cooking was too complex, she decided to write a book with simple dishes. She then shared some of those recipes with the New York Times resulting in a number of vegetarian, Indian dishes perfect for Thanksgiving or every day.

As I love cooking, I love recipes and the Web (including blogs) is usually the first place I go to find them. So blogs are a new(er) way of presenting information that otherwise would have been secluded or given out to a small population who bought Madhur Jaffrey's book. Now, because of blogs, specifically, today because of the "Well" blog, I was able to discover a number of new, tasty recipes for my collection.

What is a blog's impact?

Marshall McLuhan

The impact of the blog is that it gives new information or shares different information that otherwise wouldn't have been available to such a large audience. This idea is more important than the recipe or the information in those blogs. As media expert Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message."

McLuhan might also suggest that blogs in general are cool mediums. They are low definition and involve high participation. As we've seen, in blog posts there are links, photos, videos and comments.

Readers need to take all that information and put it together to make sense of the purpose and central idea of the blog post. It's a medium that creates its own process and readers need that process of skipping from link to link in order to get the full picture.

Jaffrey's book, thanks to the "Well" post today and bloggers such as myself who are sharing that information will continue to be passed along making many "impressions" on readers. If I hadn't been following the blog then I wouldn't have found it.

Not to mention that the post framed the discussion and presentation of the book to fits its readers, someone like me, who is really interested in using fall vegetables in a new way that would be a simple dish to prepare. Today's post certainly had an impact on me. What do you think about the blog's effects, specifically related to Jaffrey's book as well as generally?