Medium is the Message

Building up on my prior research finding that internet and other mediums of mass communication are a prominent part of the utopic ideal, I decided to look into the works of Marshal McLuhan. I picked up McLuhan’s book ‘Understanding Media: Extensions of Man’ to understand his ideologies. More than fifty years after its publication the content of the book still holds relevance.

In this very book McLuhan presented his iconic words ‘medium is the message’. By saying this McLuhan means that it is not the content of the medium that matters. Instead, the characteristics of that medium determine its content. We’re shifting from mechanical technology to electric technology. Mechanical technology detribalized humans. Now electric technology is retribalizing humans. This shift causes stress in the ways we interact with one another. Our lack of awareness of how technology changes the way we interact is a threat to civilization.

Medium is the message is often used in the context of media thought to be very influential on society, including forms of media that are thought to have changed, or to have the potential to change, how people experience the world. For example, the expression may be used in the context of discussion of the social media platform Twitter and how its limitations on the character count of posts influences the way people communicate and perceive messages contained in those posts.

To McLuhan, media is anything that extends our capabilities as humans. As he says, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the psychic and social complex.” In other words, any media extends our capabilities. In the process, it changes how we think, and how we interact with one another. Every medium alters what McLuhan calls “sense ratios.”

In other words, the characteristics of the medium cause personal and social consequences. What’s subtly implied here is that the content we’re so often concerned about, violence in video games, for example, is really caused by the medium itself.