'The Medium' is what happens to you and that is 'The Message'.
Some selected quotes of Marshall McLuhan on 'the medium is the message' and what it means.
The easiest way I’ve found to discover what Marshall McLuhan meant by ‘the medium is the message’ or what it means to us today and why we should care deeply, is to look at a few examples of what he actually said about it, to sit with it, to chew on it.
“The medium is the message means … that a totally new environment has been created.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, 1964
“There is no kind of technology, from speech to clothes to satellites and computers, that does not constitute an environment of services and disservices. Speech transforms all perception. So does clothing.”
Marshall McLuhan, February 28, 1973
“In the course of doing this work, I discovered what’s wrong with the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. What they call ‘noise,’ I call the medium—that is, all the side-effects, all the unintended patterns and changes.”
Marshall McLuhan, letter to Jerome Agel, March 26, 1976.
That last one is especially succinct. The ‘medium’ is all the side-effects, the unintended patterns and changes. That ‘medium’ is the message of technology, what gets us regardless of whether we get it.
Conventional communication models or theories tend to be concerned with ‘the message,’ meaning and transmission. McLuhan was concerned with ‘the medium,’ with the total individual and social effect of the process. Addressing Shannon-Weaver again,
“Each form of transport not only carries but translates and transforms the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium … alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratio among our senses.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, 1964
“A medium works on you much like a chiropractor or some other masseur and really works you over and doesn’t leave any part of you unaffected… It is a process and it does things to you. The medium is what happens to you and that is the message.”
Marshall McLuhan, The Toronto Telegram, March 18, 1967
“The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Postscript 1970’
The medium is what happens to you and that is the message.
Given that we only pay attention to a fraction of what’s happening either within or around us at any given moment, the bulk of technological change happens well below our level of awareness. Just as when an invisible contaminant is in the air, we may not notice it, but we feel the effect.
McLuhan first said ‘the medium is the message’ in 1958, and over the next 30 years, he kept repeating it in so many different ways to try and get us to understand just what we were doing to ourselves when we create and use technology. We are changing who we are, and we’re doing it out of almost complete ignorance or concern of the result.
He spent his career not only pointing out that the medium is the message, but in developing ways to become more aware of that process, and ways of considering and anticipating the ‘unintended consequences’ of technologies before they become irreversible.
This is the message of the medium.