The Medium is the Message


Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message”. That sounds wrong at first. Our gut feeling is that content is more important than the medium.

What McLuhan meant was that the medium has a far bigger role than we realize. It’s not as if the message isn’t important; just that the medium has a far greater impact on the nature and scale of the change it brings about.

To get McLuhan’s point, you have to compare the world before and after that particular medium came into existence. McLuhan himself used books as an example to explain his point. To start with, books gradually led to the standardization of language (After all, if everyone spoke a different variant, it wouldn’t be easy to read the same book). Next, since books are read page by page, it led people to start describing things in a sequential format. Broadcast of instructions suddenly became possible. And that in turn enabled the coming of the Mechanical Age where workers had to follow a fixed set of instructions.

Or take TV. It allowed people to switch to another topic (channel) if something didn’t hold their attention. Which in turn led the channels to use good looking anchors. And to promote short and crisp soundbites. That’s the point Calvin makes in the strip.

And the pattern continues with the Internet. Take Twitter. Does anyone really believe that 160 character tweets carry a whole lot of content? And yet every celebrity wants to be on that medium!

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