The Medium Is The Message Summary

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In his chapter titled “The Medium is the Message”, Marshall McLuhan repudiates what is perhaps one of the most central ideas in our society: the content of a media is what matters. Instead, McLuhan presents an argument that the media itself is what truly matters. Any form of media can be used in wide variety of applications, yet media itself is the concept that rings true throughout all applications. The media is what creates change, not the content of such media Furthermore, limiting one’s perception of a media to its content is ultimately harmful to understanding the impact of new technology. Throughout the writing, McLuhan presents sound, logical arguments that lead to his conclusion articulated in the very title of the chapter, which I accept as truth.

To begin, McLuhan puts forth a simple, universal notion that the content of a medium is simply another medium. “The content of writing is speech, just as the the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. (8)” Due to this phenomenon, it is pointless to try gain an understanding from the …show more content…
McLuhan proposes a simple idea that “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (8)” The railway is offered as an example by McLuhan. The railway did not introduce transportation to the modern world (people have been moving freight since the beginning of time), yet it did drastically alter the way in which we can transport cargo. The relative distance across entire continents plummeted, and the message of the railway was asserted. This method of thinking differs from a traditional approach because it does not consider the message of a train to be goods or people, but instead the message of the railway is that we can move around further, faster, and easier than ever before. Thus, the true message of the medium is the change it introduces to
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