The medium is the message

"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and the name of the first chapter[1] in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.

[9]McLuhan argues that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs".

[12] In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.

[11] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time.

These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.

[13] Many of the conceptions presented in this work are expansions, popularizations and applications of ideas initially conceived by Walter Benjamin and the dialog between his texts and other thinkers in the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s.

[14] Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death worried that McLuhan's theory, if true, meant that television was uniquely destructive to the public conversation in America, with style trumping substance.

[15] Some modern journalists and academics have pointed to algorithms, social media and the internet as great examples of McLuhan's theory.