McLuhan: The medium is the message

In the 1940s and continuing through most of the 1960s, McLuhan was one of the first theorists of technology to examine the significance and impact of electronic technology on human senses, society and culture.

McLuhan believed that each new technology created a new human environment and thus a new way of thinking. The medium-is-the-message meant that the content of electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment. In other words, it wasn't what we were seeing on TV that was important; it was the fact that we were watching TV (and not doing other things) that altered our brains.

McLuhan saw humans as essentially communicative animals, he believed it was the technologies of communication that were primary in shaping who we were, what we thought, and how we acted, with effects that often were subliminal and therefore not recognized.

He saw three great changes in human history related to communications technology, each one having an exponentially greater effect on humanity, each one externalizing, or “outing,” one or more of the senses.

The first was the introduction of the phonetic alphabet that changed the culture of humanity from aural to written or visual. The second was the introduction of the printing press and moveable type that, in McLuhan's thought, distorted the balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract.

“If the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man,” he said, “the printing press hit him like 100-megaton H-bomb.”

Then came the advent of electronic communications technology, beginning with the telegraph, that “outed” all the senses at once, becoming an extension of the human nervous system. It is this period we are still going through, even those of us who aren't on Facebook, Twitter or whatever's next in the pipeline.