The Medium is the message

"The Medium is the message," is quoted from Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. My understanding of what he meant by that phrase is that as much or more of the weight of your message is carried by vehicle in which the content is delivered as the content itself. In other words, the way you say it is just as important if not more so than what you say. While it is an interesting theory that is true in many cases, I don’t necessarily agree with him completely. Especially with the variety and number of outlets for media today.

I think that the deluge of media that we are exposed to on a daily basis has simultaneously numbed us and made us more susceptible. We are exposed to so many images, sounds and words every day that it is very easy to filter them out and hardly realize the sheer quantity of it around us. As marketers know, it is extremely difficult to grab someones attention for even a few seconds. In this case I agree with McLuhan in that some mediums carry very little meaning to us. Where I disagree is that even though we filter out most of the messages we are exposed to in what McLuhan called “cool” mediums they still have an impact on us. TV violence is an example of this. I think that after watching years of physically and verbally violent movies and TV my conflict style has changed. I find myself much more defensive, expecting retribution and less willing to forgive. Sometimes I catch myself feeling that if I have been wronged, even by accident, I deserve the right to get angry, lash out and expect some kind of apology or “payment” for what has been done. I have observed this in others as well. The same applies for the beauty or the auto industry, even though we don’t always buy the specific brand they are trying to sell us, over time we still come to believe that in order to be attractive/accepted you need to look good or drive a nice car. Even though we have learned to ignore the message the impact still effects us.

Another topic that I’m interested in relation to McLuhan is observing how it unfolds in the future is if the same message has a different when distributed via different mediums. Does the validity of a New York Times story differ from the print, web, Kindle or iPhone versions?