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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
hannemyr.com
“The really great privilege of the elites of the future will be to erase the computer information about them, and assume their private identities again.”
Marshall McLuhan, 1969
When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.
Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment
McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us to think with the crowd.
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
The medium is the message.
—Marshall McLuhan
That’s why McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself.