Book Review: The Medium is the Message

 The Medium is the Message 

By Marshall McLuhan/

Quentin Fiore

The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_Massage


Before the alphabet, people learned through hearing and repeating. Then, people learned through seeing letters which represented ideas. Now we learn through emotion evoked by sound and sight of the media- movies, music, TV, the internet, art which uses all of our senses at once.

Mass printing created the power of detachment, non-involvement, because a person could curl up and read a good book which allowed him/her to travel to distant lands, have an adventure or learn a new skill without interacting with another individual.

Interesting that this book was written before the internet came into almost every home with facebook or other social media, full of any information desired, and with the ability for children to easily loose their innocence. Now we live everyday with these ever present issues of privacy - what should and may not be or shouldn't and may be kept private. If I had read this book when it was first published in 1967, I may not have believed or recognized the potential for these issues becoming so, either because it seemed so far fetched or because people would not have wanted or allowed it. Now life has changed for the better and for the worse.

A few interesting quotes:

"The wheel...is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing and extention of the skin; Electric circuitry, and extension of the central nervous system."

"Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act- the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change."

"The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point - Self-Effacement,
The detached Observer.
No Involvement!"

"The Viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience.
A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza."

"The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once,
No detachment or frame is possible."

"Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery-to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms."
"...shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainnwashing instructors. " LOL!!! (Sorry thought that was funny!)

"As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work."