Why the medium is the message
The Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), who generally
shunned the limelight, became the world’s most talked-about intellectual
in 1967. This was because he had summed up the media revolution – the
transition from print to TV – in a single sentence: ‘The medium is the
message.’ The sentence is not as simple as it first appears.
What does it mean?
It does not mean what you might initially think, i.e. that the medium has
become more important than its message. (A hint: McLuhan’s theories
never focus on the obvious, clear-cut or logical.) Rather, the sentence
means that the medium is not important because of its message, but
because it can change our behaviour, our thinking and our lives.
And what does that mean?
If we use the word medium, we are usually only referring to the channel
via which information is transmitted. McLuhan believed that this channel
is more formative for our culture than the message it carries. If the
message changes, we simply change our minds. But when the medium
changes, we change our behaviour. This sounded crazy in the 1960s. But
since the advent of social media, and since we have started to reflect on
the ways in which mobile devices dominate our everyday lives, it makes
much more sense. Suddenly, his meaning is crystal-clear: it’s not what we
read on our smartphone that changes our behaviour, but that we are
reading it on our smartphone. (What makes our smartphone so fascinating
that we stroke it more than our new-born child? – See ‘The Uses and
Gratifications Theory’.)
‘We shape our tools and the tools shape us,’ wrote McLuhan. He also
wrote: ‘People don’t really read newspapers. They just climb into them
every morning like into a hot bath.’ Was there ever a better description for
the Internet? In his time, McLuhan was taken more seriously by hippies
than academics. This was a double misunderstanding, because, as a
conservative Catholic, he was opposed to the media developments he
described.