The medium is the message.
You've heard this phrase before, no doubt.
For a chewy bit of a communications theory, it has a tremendous amount of traction in
culture.
Also, if you grew up here in Canada, you may even remember the heritage minute about Marshall
McLuhan's epiphany.
It's obvious...
the medium IS the message.
So, the medium is the message.
In terms of theories, few are quite as well-known and yet, still to this day, quite so radical.
That's right, even today, 51 years after understanding medium was first published, the medium is
the message is still a challenging and radical idea.
So, what does it actually mean?
Well, in McLuhan's own words, (see on-screen text)
The idea is that mediums have a far greater impact on the fundamental
shape and nature of society than any message that is delivered through that medium.
The electric light reshaped the way that humans interact with day and night.
The train, car, and airplane restructured our ideas of what cities look like and where
they can even be built.
The radio and television reshaped the way we structure our time and reshaped the way
that we physically build and arrange our houses.
Now, McLuhan died in 1980, so he didn't live to see the internet as we know it, but we
can continue to test his theory against newer technologies.
What has had a greater impact on the way that we as a society interact with one another?
All the content of every YouTube video ever made, or the existence of YouTube itself?
What has had a greater impact on the way that you interact with the world around you?
All you the conversations that you have ever had, or your mobile phone?
Now, this isn't to discount the power of content, the power of ideas, because obviously the
power of YouTube and the mobile phone is tied to the volume of the information that they
carry.
But McLuhan argues, (see on-screen text) In essence, it is an argument of capacity.
Medium's extending our capability.
What makes YouTube powerful is not its content, but its capacity to deliver content.
Content is potent but is comparatively slow.
Ideas take a long time to sink in, to catch on and to spread.
But technology will steamroll and rebuild entire ways of thought over the course of
a decade, if not faster.
Ideas change our interactions, but mediums change the fundamental scale of those interactions.
The cell phone, for example, completely reshaped the personal habits and rituals of social
gatherings.
We have changed the way that we think about clothing and its utility to accommodate our
phones.
To a lot of people, the location of power outlets and cable ports all but dictates how
they arrange the public areas of their home.
To draw a comparison to natural forces, ideas are like erosion.
Powerful and unstoppable, but slow.
Mediums are earthquakes, dramatically and even violently reshaping the landscape overnight
when they arrive.
Going back to this quote, the argument to be made, then, is that no arguments about
ideas should ever be fully divorced from the mediums by which those ideas are delivered
and the character of those mediums.
Because more than just the way that mediums reshape our physical lives, they reshape the
very nature of the content that they deliver.
So far I've focused mostly on tangible examples of the way that we interact with mediums,
the way that they directly alter the scale of our interactions, but McLuhan was perhaps
more so interested in how mediums imprinted themselves into the very fabric of any content
that was delivered through them, and how persistent exposure to that limitation alters social
thought in the same way that the physical television alters the arrangement of the home.
Anyone who has immersed themselves in Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about
their use of language to fit the character limit.
This has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar, and to the complexity of the communication.
You could argue that Tumblr's unique expansion of the tag system has acclimatized users to
self-visualize as a series of labels.
This is because we as tool users view our tools as extensions of ourselves.
The hammer is an extension of our arm.
The car an extension of our body.
The camera an extension of our eyes, the photograph an extension of our memory.
And the internet?
It is the pervasive and radical nature of mediums, the ability to get right down into
the root of how we think about ourselves and our ability to interact with the world that
makes the medium so much more immediately potent than the content that is delivered
over the medium.
This is why social criticism is concerned with patterns like tropes and stereotypes
and story formula, because while we have been mostly talking about physical devices and
software platforms, is a genre not a type of medium?
Think about it.
Genres don't grow on trees, and they're not even universal.
The three-act structure is not a physical phenomenon, it's an invention.
It's a tool.
In fact, if there's another phrase that encompasses the spirit of the medium is the message, it
might just be, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So what do you think?
How do the mediums you use shape the way that you see the world?
Feel free to let me know in the comments and until next time, go in peace, my children.
In the name of like, share, and subscribe.
Amen.