The medium is the message.
I like many others, didn’t really understand what this now-common phrase meant. I went about my daily life in blissful ignorance as I wrote it off as nonsense or the ramblings of some marketing guy.
It wasn’t until one of those Canadian Heritage advertisements came on during the news this morning that I bothered to care. “The medium is the message?”, I thought, “It really isn’t obvious, is it?”
Well I suppose it helps if you have some context to go by when interpreting phrases such as these so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
“He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.”
What he means by this is that new mediums just like new technologies change society. They change how society as a whole views certain issues. Things that would once shock most common people now seem average. With so much information sharing going on, we keep having to reach further and further into the bizarre and grotesque to even get a reaction out of most people these days.
By contrast, I think we’ve become more self-aware as a society. We can work toward tolerance because we now understand on average a lot more about other cultures and other ways of thinking than we once could. This may never form a Utopian society, but it certainly changes the playing field.