Text: McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media, pp. 7-21.

McLuhan’s work with literature and culture produced the revolutionary thought that “the medium is the message.”  In other words, cultures are changed not only by the “content” of technology, but also by the technology itself.

The basic “content” of technology is easy to recognize.  The content of the railway would seem to be transportation; the content of the Internet would seem to be information.  But McLuhan’s idea that the medium proclaiming the “content” is itself the message is a hard one to understand.

In the example of the railway, he says that “[t]he railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure” (8).  In other words, in addition to providing fast and available transportation for people, the railway also fundamentally restructured society.  People were able to travel, see new things, have new experiences, realize that there are people living lives very different from their own.  A farmer in the country and a doctor in Philadelphia suddenly both had the ability to travel the country by train and enlarge their views of American society as a result.  The railway united citizens across the country and created a new sense of nationalism.  (Of course, as with most technology, there were social class restrictions involved with the availability of railway travel, but that point is not relevant to McLuhan’s argument.)  Society’s views of work changed with the railway as well.  One no longer had to live in a city in order to work there.  It could likely be argued that this created American “suburbia” as we know it today.  McLuhan’s argument holds that beyond transportation, the railway had tremendous “psychic and social consequences” on society (8).

Another example McLuhan offers is a particularly good one: the electric light (9).  Many would believe that the light has no “content” unless it is spelling something such as “Open,” or “Miller Light.”  But McLuhan says that the electric light itself communicates a message.  The invention of the electric light restructured the way our society thought of “day” and “night.”  Work no longer had to stop when the sun went down--one only had to turn on a light to continue work indoors.  Light also has psychological effects.  Low lighting in a restaurant communicates a message of quietness and perhaps romance, whereas the bright fluorescent lighting in a classroom communicates activity, promotes attention.  Perhaps it is no wonder that to calm down an elementary school class after recess, the teacher often turns off the lights--she is communicating a message to her students through the technology of the electric light.

In order to recognize and understand the social and psychological effects of technology as exemplified by the railway and electric light illustrations, one must “conside[r] not only the ‘content’ but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates” (11).  McLuhan claims that all technology can be analyzed this way; but many researchers have studied only the effects of the content of technology on our society and neglected to look at it within the “cultural matrix.”

To illustrate this type of research, McLuhan cites a study by Professor Wilbur Schramm, Television in the Lives of Our Children, in which he compared children growing up with TV and children growing up without it.  McLuhan states: “Since he made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image, his tests were of ‘content’ preferences, viewing time, and vocabulary counts.  In a word, his approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit unconsciously so.  Consequently, he had nothing to report . . . Program and ‘content’ analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge” (19-20).  The effect of TV on a society cannot be measured by such a study as Schramm’s because it neglects to acknowledge that children are being affected by the TV itself, and not only the words that they hear from it.  Children raised watching a lot of TV may expect the people in their lives (teachers, parents) to entertain them, they may be more likely to tune out because they can catch the "rerun," and they may subconsciously assume that the people talking to them can't see them, like television actors and anchors don't see them.  For researchers who study technology from Schramm’s approach, technology like “[t]he electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no ‘content’” (9).

In order to understand our culture, it is important to recognize the medium as the message because technology creates a cultural “grammar,” a system on which messages operate.  The technology of print brought tremendous psychological and social changes to society, creating “individualism and nationalism” among other things (19-20).  McLuhan says that “Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography,” the first to understand print as a message itself that structures society (13).  Professor Schramm did not have this foundation when he tested the effects of TV on children, and therefore, according to McLuhan, “[h]ad his methods been employed in 1500 A.D. to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography” (19).  But with the understanding that “the medium is the message” as the approach of his research, de Tocqueville claimed that “it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation” and was fundamentally connected to if not essentially responsible for the French Revolution (14).  De Tocqueville realized that the “typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society” and empowered the formerly illiterate peasants with a sense of unity that led to their uprising against the upper class (14).  When the peasant people were able to read, they read about other people’s points of view and experiences, and they were willing to fight to change their society as they knew it.

Currently, our society is changing again with the onslaught of electric media, namely computers and the Internet.  We must continue to analyze this technology with the realization that the medium is the message, or else we will never fully understand our culture or the effect of technology on it and on our lives.