The Medium is the Massage
We have to start somewhere, might as well with Marshall McLuhan
Hello, my readers. That’s a fun message to write.
While we’ve not yet fully defined this email's form, my goal will not be to bog us down in any more context than is necessary. I will likely do a lot of linking and if you are interested in something, feel free to learn about it. Ok, back to your regularly scheduled content.
We start our journey of exploring context and content near where I started my exploration of this subject 15 years ago: with Marshall McLuhan.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous line, “The medium is the message,” first introduced in 1964’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is where I choose to begin because it gets at a fundamental idea that I think we’re casually aware of in some cases and completely unaware of in others: The mediums we use to navigate the world influence the messages that pass through them.
The discussion has raged ever since: how much influence do mediums (or contexts) have over the messages (or content) sent through them?
How much influence does the email app you’re reading this in have over the email’s content?
How much influence does the short-video format of an Insta story have over the type of information communicated through it?
How much impact does the choice to send someone a text, give them a phone call, have a Zoom meeting, or meet them in person have over what’s communicated?
Take 2 minutes to check out this brief video introduction:
McLuhan examined the ways different communication mediums dictated the forms of content that could uniquely happen over them in his time. Still, the question remains: what effects are these media really having on us?
See you again soon to find out.
Further Reading & Notes:
You can check out for free (hear me out) Playboy’s 1969 Interview with McLuhan. In it, he drops some interesting asides and covers his main points. Here’s a lightly edited PDF from UC Davis.
The title of this post comes from a typo that became a book called The Medium is the Massage. It’s a good overview from its time of McLuhan’s main ideas but it’s a somewhat trippy read. Here’s an excerpt from its Wikipedia article:
The book is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror. Some are intentionally left blank. Most contain photographs and images both modern and historic, juxtaposed in startling ways.
Understanding Media via Amazon. Understanding Media is a very… how to put this… dense read, but if you like original sources, it’s as authentic as it gets.
For those of you that are like, “Wait, I signed up to read about environments! What’s all this?” I hear you. We’re going places, have no fear.