For the Media Junkie: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

This slim volume has texture enough to keep one mentally burrowing through the implications for days after. First impression is a total visual assault—pithy quotes from other great thinkers, photos galore—Marilyn Monroe, illustrations from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a sculpture of the “biggest and best woman in the world” (82 feet in length and 20 feet in height), surreal architecture born of past and present edifices superimposed, blurred yet potent photo collages. All of this and then McLuhan’s own text. Take my word for it, every sentence is quotable. This is not just a study of media and its influences; it is a collection of aphorisms for the modern info-saturated age.

 

 

The meat and gravy of McLuhan’s inquiry is this: Where do media technologies end and where do I begin? Where do I end and where does the media take hold and consume my external world? The key is that McLuhan does not make a distinction between the internal and the external self—no old hat dichotomies for this guy. Rather than viewing media as something by which we are bombarded by the outside world, The Medium is the Massage suggests (or, really, outright dictates) that humans and their media technologies are impossible to clearly divide at any one point. Consider Zeno’s paradox. The wheel (and thus the car) is an extension of the human foot. The television tube is an extension of one’s own visual operating systems.

The point is that we are submerged in a mediasphere that is ubiquitous yet for the most part goes unnoticed. This, however, is not to say that there are not implications that go hand-in-hand with the advent of this brave new world. Questions of personal, societal, and cultural identity arise, questions of privacy and security arise, questions of the way we communicate and interrelate with family, peers, coworkers, and authorities arise. Such issues were especially relevant at the time of publication in 1967, as the evolution of media was speeding up with greater and greater force, print technology, phones, radios, and, finally, television. As has been the case for most of history, technology typically is innovated much faster than the populace has time to come to terms with the shedding of former technologies, and issues of ethics may arise in some cases. In a nutshell, the majority of the global population is going to be around twenty years behind its technology in terms of acceptance, familiarity, and thoughtful application. For this reason, The Medium is the Massage was especially important in its time.

 

 

The mediascape has changed and is in many ways completely alien to that of the 1960s, but McLuhan’s theories hold. The media may change, but the core implications still must be dealt with head on. I would go so far as to say that this book is more important than ever here and now in our age of World Wide Webb-ing.