Month: September 2016

What is really made me interesting about the book are the title and the backward text, so in next paragraph, I will express my idea about the intension between them.

In the first few pages, McLuhan talks about how electric technology has changed and affected on every aspect of our lives. In this rapid changing technology age, social media has many channels to cast its information to people via television, movie, internet, radio and etc.  The content or the information for which it delivers is not important, McLuhan argues that the Medium, which means the method or the process of how information is distributed and received by people play a much more importance role and effect on us. He gave many examples about the effect of you, your family, your neighborhood, etc.  But I’m more curious about the effect of the medium, the title is “The Medium is the massage” because the medium plays a role of massaging our feeling and our sense of perception toward the information that we perceive. To illustrate this experience, McLuhan intentionally wrote some of the texts backwards, in this medium or method of reading the text, it makes me tired and very difficult to read these words, and I almost wanted to give up and not reading it. If the medium is very usually or well used everywhere, then we might not be paying too much attention to the content that we perceive.  Hence, McLuhan tries to emphasize the importance of the medium in the title of the book.