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The Medium Is the Massage

Tom Butler Bowdon • 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)

Marshall McLuhan reversed the understanding of media with his famous “The medium is the message.” It is the media themselves, not the transmitted information, that produce the effect—and not only on the receiving side but on all involved and on society as a whole.

Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution

❝ Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either. / Marshall McLuhan

Issue 59: A Bulletin for Big Ideas and Better Business

Every new medium of communication changes communication, whether that’s painting or hieroglyphs or the alphabet or television. Each medium creates a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility.

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message. Moreover this environment is always invisible and its content is always the old technology.”

3 Reversal

Media and technology are always extensions of ourselves out there into the physical world. And the media and technology at our disposal has a drastic impact on not only what we think of as being a human being but also on our very perceptions, on what we perceive at all.

Marshall McLuhan • Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other

Marshall McLuhan • Understanding Media

The free-market spirit permeated the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996. Promoted with great enthusiasm by President Bill Clinton and his technophilic vice president, Al Gore, the legislation stripped away most of the market strictures that had defined the structure of the media industry since the Communications Act of 1934. It erased the