"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that
the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic
relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
Publications The phrase was introduced in McLuhan's
most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published
in 1964. McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries,
should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in
which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but
also by the characteristics of the medium itself.
McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message", changing it to "mass age",
"mess age", and "massage"; a later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally
to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title,
which is said to have been a printing error.
Key concepts For McLuhan, it was the medium itself
that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and
action". Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium
played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence
and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure."
Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal
connections" to "configurations". Extending the argument for understanding
the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the "content of any medium
is always another medium" – thus, the content of writing is speech, print is
that of writing and print itself is the content of the telegraph.
McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a
clear demonstration of the concept of "the medium is the message". A light
bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a
television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that
is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that
would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as
a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an
environment by its mere presence." Likewise, the message of a newscast
about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the
content — and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the
newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into
the home to watch over dinner. Hence in Understanding Media, McLuhan
describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the
burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to
focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable
information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in
our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As
society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the
technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These
range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through
interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a
cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.
On the subject of art history, McLuhan interpreted Cubism as announcing clearly
that the medium is the message. For him, Cubist art required "instant sensory
awareness of the whole" rather than perspective alone. In other words, with
Cubism one could not ask what the artwork was about, but rather consider
it in its entirety. See also
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Hyperreality Philosophy of technology
Technology and society References
External links MediaTropes eJournal A scholarly
journal, Vol. 1, Marshall McLuhan's "Medium is the Message": Information
Literacy in a Multimedia Age Guardian Big Ideas podcast by Benjamen
Walker