Reading "The Medium is the Massage" by Marshall McLuhan is like watching "Donnie Darko". Clues are encrypted in words and it's as if the author doesn't really want you to understand it. Both pieces requires further exploration on the Internet in order to get the grips with it.
I found a good interpretation here. It sounds right because it's what the book could've been, nice & clear. But who am I? I'm one of the few people that didn't enjoy Donnie.
According to the site "the medium" in the phrase is not actually the mass media but the extentions of a person. An example given there is a news report. It says the actual content of the news doesn't matter but it's the influences of the news as a whole that matters. But I would argue that if that's the case then isn't the content important?
The book is a quicker read than it looks mainly because it has lots of pictures. I can't help but feel that McLuhan is writing it out of fear. The fear of technology, fear of the young and the fear of change. I also find him contradicting himself. If he says new technologies are extentions of ourselves then aren't we just fulfilling our biological needs due to evolution? McLuhan explains how new technologies will change our actions of our lives but doesn't really talk about the ultimate consequences of those actions.
I also read about 2 pages of "The Gutenberg Galaxy" also by McLuhan mainly because of Irma Boom's monograph called "Gutenberg Galaxy II". So far I haven't understood a word of it but I'll try to keep trying.
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