The medium was supposed a soothing massage, and nowadays in some regions/channels the elicited emotion is,
panic
(Consistently with the text: «Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts.»)
First read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didnât quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didnât quite grasp it. Was only a few years back, when I looked at social media through the lens of the book that I finally got the âah haâ moment. I canât say how much it holds up overall, but itâs definitely mind-expanding.
McLuhan's dissertation, "The Classical Trivium," is well worth the read:
https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learni...
And now, increasingly, the tribe is the message, and each tribe aligns with their own medium.
This reminds me of that Sopranos episode where there is a US Marshall named McLuhan. A nurse notices and asks, "So that makes you 'Marshall McLuhan'?", but the Marshall doesn't get it. (Neither did I at the time, to be fair.)
One past thread:
This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250 - April 2015 (27 comments)
The old media is the content until the new medium discovers it's own content, not possible in previous mediums.
The global action 3D MMO that is built and modified by the user is the USP of the final medium: programming the internet!
Typo, it should be "The Medium Is the Massage"
TIL the original book was published in '64âkinda surprised to learn that, because by that time experiments with mediums were already quite widespread, particularly in literature (afaik): e.g. Principia Discordia, âpublishedâ in '63. Pretty sure that suprematism and constructivism from the '15s and '20's were steps in this direction, and by the time of brutalism and general mid-century modernism, things were in full swing. Take Swiss modernism in print design: it's hard to not get the message.
By now, of course, the sentiment has permeated the cultureâso in the recent discussion on Codex Seraphinianus, the comments immediately derail it to works that are âweirdâ but play with the form at least as much as the content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428
"Retina" LCDs and high quality earbuds have turned the internet into a "hot" medium, which causes recipients to believe the messages they are receiving. This puts society in a different position than previously when broadcast analog video was the prime media, and its noise and low definition made messages less believable and encouraged skepticism. TV was a "cold" medium. The hot internet is more like the hot broadcast radio and wired audio of the '20s and '30s during the rise of the great totalitarian regimes.
I am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the first read feel illuminating. I felt the same way when first reading Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guttari, Micheal Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida. After a cursory rereading at an age older than 18, I realized how badly I had been deceived.
I just do not buy this idea of "hyperreality", or that somehow media representations meaningfully "distort reality". Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't because of the media). The map is NOT the territory. The medium is NOT the message (or even a "massage", but maybe a "mass age"). I do not deny that a medium has impact on the message, but this notion of it being identical or even worth speaking about as though they are identical is so alien and absurd to me I cannot even figure out where it started.
I will give credit to Marshall Mcluhan for not writing in an insufferable or "fashionable nonsense" style like the others I have compared him to. He is a fine but definitely overrated author.
UbuWeb has also collected interviews and other audio gems about/featuring McLuhan, including two tracks from the late 1960s Columbia Records' LP "The Medium is the Massage": https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html
And there's also a 1999 documentary film about McLuhan entitled "Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan": https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan.html
Years ago, I would spend hours browsing UbuWeb. What a treasure trove! It also pays to point out that while the site was launched in 1996 (by artist-poet Kenneth Goldsmith), its UI has remained more or less the same since about 2005.