“The Medium in the message” emphasizes the medium’s form more, the medium’s importance. For “form,” the common term is “content”. We often use our cell phones to watch news and videos belonging to the “medium”. Theoretically, there are two levels of meaning. On the first level, it is emphasized that the form of media is the most important, as it can influence society and people. For human beings, McLuhan argues that the media can influence the structure of human perception; for society, the media is the driving force of society because it can separate different social forms, and the media itself determines the media characteristics of each era. The second level of meaning is then: “The medium is the content (message) of another medium”, meaning that the old medium is the content of the new medium. For example, the spoken word is the content of the written word, the written word is the content of the printed book, the image is the content of the movie, and the movie image is the content of the television. The Internet is the content of all the mediums that came before it. Even the people who surf the Internet are the content of the Internet, which is what McLuhan suggests when he says, “The medium in the message, and the user is the content of the medium.” We are now in the age of self-media, everyone is a producer of the Internet. The content we produce constitutes the Internet itself, another successful prophecy of McLuhan.
McLuhan’s “medium is the message” emphasizes the critical role of media forms in determining the development of human beings and society, and in communication, which is mainly concerned with “content”, McLuhan makes people pay attention to the influence of the media forms themselves through the dissemination of information. Through the dissemination of information, McLuhan has drawn attention to the influence of the media form itself. For communication studies, McLuhan opened up a media shift in communication research, prevented communication studies from falling into the narrow framework of effect studies, laid the theoretical foundation, and established the legitimacy for the emergence of the media environment school. Nowadays, McLuhan’s accurate foresight and profound insights are full of explanatory power for the characteristics of the Internet era, allowing us to more deeply understand the nature of the media in a mediated society and thus attach greater importance to the remarks made by McLuhan.