“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan introduced in McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.[1] McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.
McLuhan uses the term ‘message’ to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped. And the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says “Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action.”[2] Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed “the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.”[3] Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations.”[3] Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the “content of any medium is always another medium”[4] – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.
McLuhan frequently punned on the word “message,” changing it to “mass age,” “mess age,” and “massage.” A later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error.[citation needed]
Concerning the title, McLuhan wrote:
The title “The Medium Is the Massage” is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There’s a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, ‘Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.’ This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title.”[5]
