The Medium is the Massage

The Medium is the Massage is a popular classic, a collide-o-scopic journey through the Marshall McLuhan-looking glass. When first documented, McLuhan's prophetic perceptions on life in the age of electronic information were often perplexing. Three decades later his observations are disturbingly clear, remarkably accurate.

Marshall McLuhan understood the power of the media long before those in control did.

The Medium is the Massage presents some of McLuhan's most amazing insights and cognitive observations on the global village, the rear-view mirror, the invisible environment, the end of nature, the sensory impact set against the everyday imagery of mass media, consumer goods, the press, advertising and the arts.

First published in 1967, The Medium is the Massage has sold more than one million copies worldwide.

The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to "the others." And they're changing dramatically.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.

The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology—mechanization.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of 30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966. Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools-with yesterday's concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present environment-the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.

"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."

—A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the "serious" student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor—a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.

"The Medium is the Massage" is a look-around to see what's happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on "substance." The dramatic and rapid changes of "substance" elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

you

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been...? Are you aware of the fact...? I have here before me... Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-totomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes". We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that aM of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What's that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

your
family

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flightfar surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

your
neighbourhood

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than "a place for everything and everything in its place". You can't go home again.

your
education

There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom. Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute "adult" news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties —and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines. The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up—that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

your
job

"When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?" "Jobs" represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute "mechanization" and "specialism". These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time. Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and "human" service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty. Unhappily, many well-intentioned political reform programs that aim at the alleviation of suffering caused by unemployment betray an ignorance of the true nature of media-influence. "Come into my parlor, said the computer to the specialist.

your
government

Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. A new form of "politics" is emerging, and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

the
others

The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained— ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

All media are
extensions of
some human
faculty—
psychic or
physical.

the book is an extension of the eye...
clothing, an extension of the skin...
electric circuitry,
an extension of the central nervous system.

Media, by altering the environment,
evoke in us unique ratios of sense
perceptions. The extension of any one
sense alters the way we think and act
—the way we perceive the world.

when
these
ratios
change
men change.

The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear— "hearing was believing". The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.

Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform,

c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s
and
c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d

The line, the continuum

— this sentence is a prime example-

became the organizing principle of life. "As we begin, so shall we go". "Rationality" and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.

For many people rationality has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. "I don't follow you" means "I don't think what you're saying is rational".

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little "visuality" in it is lost on him.

Rationality and visuality have long been interchangeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.

The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts—"specialism"—reflected the stepby-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.

"The eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will".
— Wordworth

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city. Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

printing, a ditto device

Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first assembly line—mass production. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire—and conspire. Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.

A cell for citters to cit in.

The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn't work as well in our electronic world. The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.

“Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.

We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington once remarked, "We haven't heard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter."

At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses. We have been left d-a-ng-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness.

easteregg

We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.

An astronomer looking through a 200-inch telescope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, "How can you tell?" "Because my corns hurt".

Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Antienvironments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of "gaining perspective." This psychological process derives unconsciously from print technology.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth

The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream. It created totally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.

The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man's desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

The end of the line.

Enviro

nment

The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "welladjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes". "Well-adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor "ain't got nothin' on". The new environment was clearly visible to him.

Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoopington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves-he was always the man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the silver screen, all through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as a probe.

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what's really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story lineno sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.

amateur

"My education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day school. My hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets". Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago".
—J. Robert Oppenheimer

Some notes on
The Medium is the Massage

Cristina Miquel

Marshall McLuhan presents a series of profound discussions in his book "The Medium is the Massage" that remain pertinent today and elicit a wide array of perspectives. Below, I will delve into some of these dialogues and share my personal viewpoint.

The Medium is the Message: McLuhan asserts that the very essence of the communication medium is more significant than the information it conveys. This concept challenges the conventional belief that the content's substance holds greater importance than its presentation. Personally, I largely align with this perspective. I hold the view that how information is presented, be it through text, visuals, videos, or any other medium, shapes our perception and understanding. This is particularly evident in the digital age, where aesthetics and presentation play a pivotal role in engaging and retaining the audience's attention.
Media as Extensions of Our Senses: McLuhan argues that media act as extensions of our sensory experiences and intellect. This notion underscores that media not only deliver information but also mold our encounters and comprehension of the world. I concur that media profoundly influence our perception of reality. Modern technology, such as smartphones and social media, extends our communication and connectivity capabilities but poses challenges in terms of striking a balance in utilizing these extensions without distancing ourselves from direct human experiences.
The Sedative Effect of Media: McLuhan issues a cautionary note about how media can become a type of sedative, numbing our capacity for critical perception. While I agree that it is crucial to be mindful of how we consume media and set boundaries to prevent addiction or indifference toward information, I may hold some points here. McLuhan's characterization of media seems to oversimplify the complex relationship between individuals and the media they engage with.
While some media can indeed lead to passivity, others have the potential to inspire critical thinking and social activism (as himself states when talking about the TV). For instance, social media platforms have been instrumental in mobilizing social movements and raising awareness about critical issues. Though, It may be the year when the book was written, 1967, what has left this analysis quite limited.
Globalization and the Global Village: McLuhan also introduces the concept of the "global village," where media diminish geographical distances and instantly connect people worldwide. While this can foster global understanding and awareness of diverse cultures, it also raises questions about cultural homogenization and the erosion of local distinctiveness. In my perspective, media globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon that demands a balance between embracing cultural diversity and preserving local identities.

For a Digital Product Designer, the insights from McLuhan's work are particularly relevant. In the digital realm, the multiple alternatives of communication mediums, whether it's a website, mobile app, or interactive interface, plays a crucial role in shaping the user's experience and perception. Understanding that the medium itself carries a message can guide designers to make informed decisions about how to convey information, foster user engagement, and maintain a cohesive user experience. Additionally, in a world saturated with digital content, being aware of the potential negative impact that our work (as trasnmitters of messages) can have, may encourage us to create interfaces that prioritize clarity and user-centered design, ensuring that users stay engaged and informed.

I finish this analysis by stating how much I would have liked an update of this book by McLuhan in today's terms. Would have he thought the same? Would have he changed his mind? We'll never know.

you

yourfamily

yourneighbourhood

youreducation

yourjob

yourgovernment

theothers