Reading 5 – McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

While reading “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, I was quite confused. I did not fully understand what he meant by the word massage and had to look it up. It turns out it was a printing error, but McLuhan kept it as it reflects the main point of his writing. His thesis is that the medium that content is delivered through is more influential than the content itself. One passage that stood out to me was titled “you.” It caught my attention because it began with asking many personal questions, such as “have you ever contemplated suicide?” and “how much do you make?” These are things people would keep private, but with the devices of media, sharing information among others is vast. McLuhan mentions a dilemma of the claim to privacy and the community’s need to know, bringing up an important question: “how should the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other?” I think with the use of social media, we are all connected and involved in each other’s lives in some way. But something that we should all carefully consider is what we put out there or share, since there is no true “erasure” of that information. Another passage that stood out to me was titled “your education.” McLuhan brings up how children that watch television are shown news that is considered “adult,” such as inflation, war, rioting, taxes, crime, and bathing beauties. But in a classroom setting it is entirely different, with structure, pattern, and schedules, much like factories and assembly lines. To me, it seems like he is arguing that the education system does not reflect what goes on in the real world, yet the real world is one that is negative and harsh. These two different environments do not set up a child to truly grow up. Something I did not like about this book was the photos included, as the black and white colors made the pictures scary and harder to understand.