Medium Is The Message

The MediumIsTheMessage is a famous quote by the late eminent futurist MarshallMcLuhan. His works are worth reading even though they are more than twenty years old.

Note that TheMediumIsTheMassage (not message) is also used - as a book title (ISBN 1584230703 ) and for a recording.

(MarshallMcLuhan first said "message", then used "massage" in the book title as a little joke.)

http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/faqs.html

The almost 40-year-old-book foretold correctly the profound effects of the electronic age. One of the quotes was A. N. Whitehead: "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."

MarshallMcLuhan was not at all a "futurist". On the contrary, he was mostly focused on the present, understanding it in particular in terms of his famous tetrad ("At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other." - Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Parker. The Global Village).

One of his mottos said, by the way, "The present is the future of the future".

MarshallMcLuhan:: "The medium is the message, therefore the audience is the content."

-- quoted on http://www.angelfire.com/biz/aquariusmedia/index2.html and http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/c/x/cxp7/ and http://web.archive.org/web/20010731103147/http://users.drak.net/phoenix/index2.html

MarshallMcLuhan said, "The medium is the message." Less well known, however, is his farsighted, "The audience is the content." He couldn't have known how possible this is on the World Wide Web. -- http://www.commerce.net/research/reports/white_papers/worldclas.html

: [That one is really true on Wiki: The audience is the content.]

When MarshallMcLuhan said, "the medium is the message," he went on to say, "the audience is the content." -- from http://web.archive.org/web/20011203053001/http://www.crossover.com/reus/bio114.html [BrokenLink (amended to archive). See also http://hotwired.lycos.com/braintennis/96/28/index1a.html.]

MarshallMcLuhan also saw what was coming. His famous aphorism, "the medium is the message", had a second crucial part. "And, the audience is the content" is rarely remembered. What did he mean? ... -- from http://www.nettime.org/desk-mirror/zkp3/01/01.html

CategoryBook, CategoryBigPicture