The Medium is the Message

One of the most famous remarks that Marshall McLuhan ever made was, "The medium is the message" (McLuhan, 1997, p.7). This is very confusing to many people at first. People often consider that a communication medium carries messages, but they neglect to consider what the medium actually does to the world they live in. This is what Marshall McLuhan was attempting to reveal to people through his remark. "New media do not simply add themselves on, like freight cars to train, but rebuild and reroute the total sensory transportation complex" (Mackenzie, 1967). Every time that a new medium comes along, or an old medium is changed into a new one, the very social fabric of society is changed to adapt to the new medium. This is how the medium becomes the message. "This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology" (McLuhan, 1995, p.151).

What all this means is that a new medium doesn't just offer a new way for people to communicate. It changes the way in which people communicate and is thus a message itself. The way in which people communicate would tell an alien to this planet exactly what the people are like. The written word is a linear format that speech tries to imitate. In a world based on the written word everything is produced in a linear fashion. There is a beginning middle and end to everything. It is nearly impossible to begin something in the middle of the process without becoming hopelessly lost. This is a very different world from the pre-Gutenberg era. In that time the world was based on speech. It was not based on a linear format.

These two examples also demonstrate another one of McLuhan's facts.

"This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, 'What is the content of speech?," it is necessary to say, 'It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal" (McLuhan, 1995, p.151).
If this fact is combined with the fact that a medium does not add itself onto another medium, but that it creates a new medium, it is possible to see that the medium is the message since it changes the world in which people live to have them act and communicate in totally new ways.