Sublime

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.

McLuhan once said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive environment, a pervasive medium is always beyond perception.” The big point to McLuhan is this: the messages that these media of written language are sending to us go far beyond the actual content or subject matter of the thing that’s being written abo... See more

McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics. Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.

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.