The Medium Is the Message

Technology has advance quite a lot in the past few years, it has evolved and with it the ability to share information. At the beginning there were text messages from person to person. Over the years this type of technology has grown into tool that is accessible for pretty much everyone everywhere. Communication has been affected by this technology such as simple things like a text message to what now is known as “posts” on social media. Communication has been affected in such a way that it has a certain influence in pretty much every topic of society, unlike the past decade where information was only a small influence in how a society was raised/built. As an example on the book “The Medium Is The Message: An Inventory Of Effects” the author states that “everything is changing – You, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to the ‘others’ and they are changing dramatically.” This statement refers to the impact that technology has had on all levels of society and the way of living in this day and age. As an example we have the way children are being raised in the present day. Many kids have access to the kind of technology that makes it possible for them to access any type of media or any type of information whether it’s good or bad. The amount of data that they are taking in is simply overwhelming and its pushing them to grow up even faster than people realize. This book also mentions that even though information is fractured and structured in such a way that everything is ‘classified’ into its respective categories, this doesn’t seem to have an effect on how people intake information. Another point that the book makes is the fact that technology has changed the way information is shared. The book mentions that: Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.” The author tries to explain that in the past the ‘public’ were people with different points of view, and that mass is simply people being pointed to a specific point of view. An example could be the way how newspapers in the past were a very reliable source of information (even if it wasn’t) people would read it and think of how they feel about it and formulate their own points of view about that matter. Nowadays let’s pretend that the same information was shared with everyone through a social media platform, then all of a sudden someone speaks out and makes a compelling speech and millions of followers start to share “that” same point of view. This book itself brings us a revealing point of view about information and how technology has affected it. In conclusion, we can see how technology has affected the way how information is being shared and in time how that has affected our way of living.