'The Medium is the Message'

‘The Medium is the Message', a notion suggested by Herbert Marshall McLuhan of the Toronto School of communication theory. Marshall McLuhan’s notion suggested simply that the medium is more important than the content. 


When we think of media, we naturally think of its content, contents of a newspaper, a program on the television on a poster on the wall. McLuhan believed that the medium itself should be the focus of the study rather than the content carried.  A simple and clear example, where a light bulb does not carry any content in a way that a newspaper has articles or a television or radio has programs.  A light bulb as a medium, has a social effect and it enables people to create spaces in darkness which otherwise would not be there.  Marshall McLuhan describes a light bulb as a ‘medium without any content’, and that it creates an environment by its mere presence. (http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/mcluhan.htm)


McLuhan's lightbulb theory began to erupt in a series of publications arguing weather or not the Medium is in fact the message and people and researchers began arguing for and against the notion dramatically. Media could in some ways be seen as amplifiers, all the technological advances created by humans are extensions of the body and senses.  In a sense that medium could be seen as an amplification of our self’s. A technological extension of the human body and what we seek isn't intact the medium, but only what is carried. Say a television, we watch the television because it entertains us, we are interested in what we are watching, but Mcluhan wasn't interested in what was being published, he was interested in what was beyond that. In a way, we could refer the human race as ‘Cyborgs’, half biological organism, and half machine, a hybrid organism.  Binoculars are indeed an extension of the human eye, enabling us the see over vast distances without having to move an inch, a camera could be an extension of the eye AND mind, enabling us to see through a lens, and capture a still image of what can be seen, ‘in short, we are cyborgs.’ (Haraway, 1991: 150).

McLuhan believed that media created by us, is what creates us that we shape the content that inspires or makes us who we are. Over the years, each new generation has become more ‘technologically intelligent’ due to being born into an environment filled with the new advances in technology. To use phones or IPods of the newer generation, the individual must be technologically intelligent, if he/she was born around the area of portable digital devices. In theory, that individual would adapt to the device in almost no time and perhaps without the need of a manual. Where as an individual born sometime beforehand would have to learn how to adapt to almost any technological advances in the upcoming years, in other words, they learn how to do one thing, then they must learn how to do the next. 

In short, from what we have seen already, this must mean that any analysis of media content is meaningless?

(in short, we are cyborgs.’ (Haraway, 1991: 150).)
(http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/mcluhan.htm )