No, the title of this post is not a typo but rather a reference to a mistake made by a typesetter when Marshall McLuhan was bringing out his book, originally titled “The Medium is the Message”.(1)
In this weeks class, we discussed the 20th-century Canadian professor McLuhan and how he popularised the idea of how we use tools as an extension of ourselves and also how they have an impact on our behaviour.
“What has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate.”
To make the statement “the medium is the message”, you are making a deliberately paradoxical assertion for the reason that if you were to get a message in a bottle you would think that the message’s content is of importance rather than its form. McLuhan argues that this is not the case and in actual fact throughout history “what has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate.” (2)
McLuhan makes reference to the fact that when printed text on scrolls began to be produced it caused a rise of the visual as a medium of communication. Fast forward to more recent times with radio, television and the telephone we have sound being the more dominant form of communication through due to the rise in popularity of these mediums.
When thinking about this today we can note how social media, with a short amount of characters allowed in each tweet or facebook status(3), has caused the information to be a lot more condensed and concise than it has been before. People attention span is has become shorter, thus the medium is causing the message to be shorter whereas before when people sent letters, the letters generally took a while to get from one end to the other so the writer would get in all the information and content needed so as to not miss anything out.
Looking forward I can’t help but think how McLuhans' thinking will relate to the context of what mediums will be available as technologies advance. What effect will the rise of the medium of Virtual Reality have on how a message is both sent and received.
References
(1) https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko6J9v1C9zE
(3) https://www.fastcompany.com/3028656/the-proven-ideal-length-of-every-tweet-facebook-post-and-headline-online
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