Marshall McLuhan - The medium is the message / massage

'The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.'

None of the Graphic Designers become what they are without hearing the phrase 'The medium is the message' coined by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of communication theory (how amazing is that?!) with a massive educational background including a degree from Cambridge university. His major work is a book called 'The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man' written in 1964 and is a study of media theory that proposes that the media itself, not their content should be a purpose of interest. 

While doing my research on Wikipedia I have found out an interesting thing that have caught my eye which is McLuhan's example of a light bulb that is supposed to prove the importance of studying the content of a media. Quoted, it goes like this:

 '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.'  

Reading this to a person who does not usually come across studies like this, he pointed out an important question which is why is a light bulb a media? That lead me into looking up a definition of the term media itself:

'Media (the plural of medium) are the collective communication outlets or tools that are used to store and deliver information or data.'

In my opinion, people tend to think of the carried information in a more conventional way which would probably be the form of newspaper or a radio. But if we slightly change the way of thinking about this in a more abstract way, radio provides us a sound based information and a light bulb with a visual content that, as McLuhan stated, is influential in a social matter.

Critique has been raised by some philosophers including Umberto Eco and Regis Debray stating that McLuhan uses the term media in a too abstract way making it confusing 'with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary "public" for mass consumption'.

In part one of this book, McLuhan divides media into two - hot and cold. Hot media, he states, are the ones that require small effort to be perceived ie. movies and cold are the ones that requires more of the consumers attention ie. comics.

In part two, McLuhan analyzed media one by one, mainly its form rather than content as previously stated.

The book also contains McLuhan's most famous pun - Medium is the massage which is a play on words suggesting that we are all stimulated / massaged by media.

Another important term is a 'global village' which is McLuhan's early prediction of World Wide Web and also the Facebook media.

'Global village is created by instant electronic and information movement. It is small as a village but wide as a planet where everybody is maliciously engaged in everybody elses business. The global village is a world where you don't necessarily have a harmony but an extreme concern about everyone else. And much involvement in everybody elses lives.'

To analyze all of McLuhan's work would take certainly longer than one blog post and therefore I recommend this website: Marshall McLuhan Speaks where videos and talks are shown divided into short topics that are relevant to this problematic.

 Graphic Designer Evan Linardi for his final project did a series of typographic posters and one of them was a quote from Marshall McLuhan, the others are of course worth checking out as well: