Comment by viccis
14 hours ago
>the medium is the message
If you asked 100 Americans what this aphorism means, I strongly doubt a single one could capture McLuhan's original meaning.
14 hours ago
>the medium is the message
If you asked 100 Americans what this aphorism means, I strongly doubt a single one could capture McLuhan's original meaning.
More worrisome is that the speech which that came from went on to prophetically observe that for each extension of human capability afforded by technology, there was a matching amputation in human skill/facility --- heretofore, computers have largely fit in with Steve Jobs' vision of them as "bicycles of the mind", making human effort more efficient --- the cognitive engine of LLMs looks to be dumbing down human reasoning to a least common denominator/mean:
https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...
You're right. ive struggled to understand what exactly this means, in large part perhaps it's so often misused?
I think it means something like we're trapped in the constraints of the medium. Tweets say more about the environment of twitter than whatever message happened to be sent.
but i think im off on that, ill look this person up and find out!
Some examples.
Firstly, Twitter has an upper bound on the complexity of thoughts it can carry due to its character limit (historically 180, now somewhat longer but still too short).
Secondly, a biased or partial platform constrains and filters the messages that are allowed to be carried on it. This was Chomsky's basic observation in Manufacturing Consent where he discussed his propaganda model and the four "filters" in front of the mass media.
Finally, social media has turned "show business [into] an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing." [0] The content and messages disseminated by online personas and influencers are not authentic; they do not even originate from a real person, but a "hyperreal" identity (to take language from Baudrillard) [0]:
Emphasis mine. Influencers have been sepia-tinted by the profit orientation of the medium and their messages do not correspond to a position authentically held. You must now look and act a certain way to appease the algorithm, and by extension the audience.
If nothing else, one should at least recognize that people primarily identify through audiovisual media now, when historically due to lack of bandwidth, lack of computing and technology, etc. it was far more common for one to represent themselves through literate media - even as recently as IRC. You can come to your own conclusions on the relative merits and differences between textual vs. audiovisual media, I will not waffle on about this at length here.
The medium itself is reshaping the ways people represent, think about, and negotiate their own self-concept and identity. This is beyond whatever banal tweets (messages) about what McSandwich™ your favourite influencer ate for lunch, and it's this phenomena that is important and worth examining - not the sandwich.
[0] Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus, 1977. https://www.tvo.org/transcript/155847
It's confusing because "message" is not using its lay meaning, and decades of "medium" and "media" meaning drift meant that it isn't either.
For "the medium is the message", "medium" refers to any tool that acts as an extension of yourself. TV is an extension of your community, even things like light bulbs (extends your vision) are included in his meaning.
McLuhan argued that all forms of media like that carry a message that's more than just their content. "The message" in that argument refers to the message the medium itself brings rather than its content. For example, the airplane is "used for" speeding up travel over long distance, but the the message of its medium itself is to "dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for."
You can see it happening via online media that extend ourselves across the internet. Think of how, once easy video creation via Youtube became uniform, web comics stopped becoming a popular medium for comedy online. It's not like the web comics faded because they got worse; it's that they faded into a niche format because people didn't want to communicate via static images anymore. Or how, once short form videos on TikTok got big, you saw other platforms shift to copy the paradigm. McLuhan's point is that it's not just the content of those short form videos that matters; it's the message of the format itself. Peoples' attention spans grow shorter because of the format, and before too long, we saw the tastes and expectations of the masses change. Reddit's monosite-with-subcommunities format and dopamine triggering voting feedback mechanism were its message more than any actual content posted there, and it's why traditional forums are niche and dwindling.
If you want to get a pretty good understanding of it, just read the first chapter from his book Understanding Media. It's short and relatively straight forward.