[Music] the medium is the message declared Marshall mcclan he even wrote a book with that name except that when the proofs came back from the types Setter as the medium is the massage he liked the mistake in the title so much he kept it this has confused people ever since though he might have intended a visual pun on massage and Mass age but what what does the medium is the message really mean it's a deliberately paradoxical statement when you get a message it's the message that's the message isn't it the content rather than its form
mclin's genius was to focus on the medium itself he argued that throughout history what has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate the technology that transfers the message changes us and changes Society the individual the family work Leisure and more take the shift from oral cultures to print-based ones for example mcluen thought the printed word encouraged an emphasis on the visual whereas in earlier oral cultures when speech was everything the dominant sense organ had bend the ear the electronic media of his day the telegraph radio television and the
telephone were he thought unifying people and encouraging participation though perhaps at the expense of Greater Conformity what was emerging was some kind of global village it's almost as if he was writing about the internet [Music]
