The Medium is the Message, Mess Age, Massage, Mass Age?

I found a great blog post on Marshall McLuhan by Maki, a senior studying psychology at Lawerence University. She provides a great summary of McLuhan and of his famous paradox, “The Medium of the Message.” She does a great job explaining what that means.

On her blog I found a link to a review of The Medium is the Message by Mark Federman entitled, “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” Federman in his essay review (which p.s. has a creative commons license which I thought was cool) makes some really interesting points. These are some of the points that I enjoyed:


Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, "The medium is the message." But what does it mean? How can the medium be its own message?

…Many people presume the conventional meaning for "medium" that refers to the mass-media of communications - radio, television, the press, the Internet. And most apply our conventional understanding of "message" as content or information. Putting the two together allows people to jump to the mistaken conclusion that, somehow, the channel supersedes the content in importance, or that McLuhan was saying that the information content should be ignored as inconsequential. Often people will triumphantly hail that the medium is "no longer the message," or flip it around to proclaim that the "message is the medium," or some other such nonsense. McLuhan meant what he said; unfortunately, his meaning is not at all obvious, and that is where we begin our journey to understanding.

Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious. In doing so, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time.

I think that true that sometimes we tend to focus on the obvious. I believe the medium does convey a powerful message, but we have to careful/intentional or we may just take away its superficial meaning.

(Side note) So I thought it was cool I that I was able to find so many great resources from a another student at Lawerence University who had also blogged on Marshall McLuhan. I left a comment on her blog and am waiting to see if she responds. :)

A great video on Marshall she found: