This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (1967) [video] | Hacker News Reader

This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (1967) [video]

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UbuWeb has also collected interviews and other audio gems about/featuring McLuhan, including two tracks from the late 1960s Columbia Records' LP "The Medium is the Massage": https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html

And there's also a 1999 documentary film about McLuhan entitled "Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan": https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan.html

Years ago, I would spend hours browsing UbuWeb. What a treasure trove! It also pays to point out that while the site was launched in 1996 (by artist-poet Kenneth Goldsmith), its UI has remained more or less the same since about 2005.

It is an incredible site.

That documentary is watchable via https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan_orbit.html. I intend to. Thanks!

The medium was supposed a soothing massage, and nowadays in some regions/channels the elicited emotion is,

panic

(Consistently with the text: «Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts.»)

See a YouTube video titled “This video will make you angry.”

First read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didn’t quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didn’t quite grasp it. Was only a few years back, when I looked at social media through the lens of the book that I finally got the “ah ha” moment. I can’t say how much it holds up overall, but it’s definitely mind-expanding.

McLuhan isn't really an author to grasp so much as he is an author to be grasped by. He's often difficult to understand but I think the point isn't so much to understand so much as, like you said, to expand your mind to new possibilities. His most powerful writing has an aphoristic, koan-like quality designed more to be provocative than to say anything specific. This can be mildly infuriating but at its best it's visionary stuff.

Philosophy is arguably better conducted showing rather than telling. Plato did this by asking questions, others do it with poetry.

It's easy to construct refined models of the world, but it ultimately isn't particularly useful and readers often get lost in this world of ideas and end exploring things they've been told rather than things they've seen. You eventually end up with something akin to scholasticism.

Once you start to notice it, we use a lot of very complicated terms and ideas in our daily language, but it's often not immediately obvious what we mean. I often come across people talk about ideas as though they had wishes and intents. Peculiar thing. Anyway I don't think adding onto that pile of long complicated words makes the situation better.

Tom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around that kind of premise.

McLuhan's dissertation, "The Classical Trivium," is well worth the read:

https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learni...

TIL, thanks!

You might be able to find a copy at a library. It's not at Archive.org / OpenLibrary or LibGen. Yet.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/classical-trivium-the-place-o...

I can confirm that a 223.28 MB PDF on Z-Library seems to be the work in question. (ISBN 1-58423-067-3) Their clearnet URLs are down right now, but the TOR link is up.

http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...

Many thanks.

And now, increasingly, the tribe is the message, and each tribe aligns with their own medium.

Even if this were true, it is nothing new : in The Netherlands after WWII every religious / political fraction had its own public broadcast group ( channels / stations are shared ), schools, sport clubs, news papers, labor unions etc.

There was even a word for it : verzuiling [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

What’s new is that the tribes can grow worldwide without physical interaction.

Marshall McLuhan had some things to say about "peer to peer electronic media" in the 1970s, and amongst was a concern that it would provoke tribalism.

Yes! And Neil Postman carried on those ideas.

This reminds me of that Sopranos episode where there is a US Marshall named McLuhan. A nurse notices and asks, "So that makes you 'Marshall McLuhan'?", but the Marshall doesn't get it. (Neither did I at the time, to be fair.)

One past thread:

This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250 - April 2015 (27 comments)

The old media is the content until the new medium discovers it's own content, not possible in previous mediums.

The global action 3D MMO that is built and modified by the user is the USP of the final medium: programming the internet!

I suspect it is not the content within that matters. It is the media that matter. It is not what electricity drive but the very electricity infrastructure that matters.

Well yes electricity is the medium, but the media still has importance. I think my comment would be more logical if you replace medium with media?

Learned something new today: https://www.shmoop.com/grammar/spelling/media-vs-medium

Thx!

Typo, it should be "The Medium Is the Massage"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

Correct for a technicality... «There are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age» (Marshall McLuhan)

Linked by the submitter is the video; the text is at https://archive.org/details/Marshall.Mcluhan..The.Medium.Is....

It's more fun and interesting than that - here's the full quote:

Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Now there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.

I've 'massaged' the title above - seems most in McLuhan's spirit.

Before smartphones were ubiquitous I had trouble convincing folks that had only heard of the book that the title was in fact “The Medium is the Massage”, they were convinced I was the one who had it wrong.

Imagine what the people watching it on NBC in 1967 must have thought!

Well worth reading: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan

TIL the original book was published in '64—kinda surprised to learn that, because by that time experiments with mediums were already quite widespread, particularly in literature (afaik): e.g. Principia Discordia, ‘published’ in '63. Pretty sure that suprematism and constructivism from the '15s and '20's were steps in this direction, and by the time of brutalism and general mid-century modernism, things were in full swing. Take Swiss modernism in print design: it's hard to not get the message.

By now, of course, the sentiment has permeated the culture—so in the recent discussion on Codex Seraphinianus, the comments immediately derail it to works that are ‘weird’ but play with the form at least as much as the content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428

"Retina" LCDs and high quality earbuds have turned the internet into a "hot" medium, which causes recipients to believe the messages they are receiving. This puts society in a different position than previously when broadcast analog video was the prime media, and its noise and low definition made messages less believable and encouraged skepticism. TV was a "cold" medium. The hot internet is more like the hot broadcast radio and wired audio of the '20s and '30s during the rise of the great totalitarian regimes.

I am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the first read feel illuminating. I felt the same way when first reading Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guttari, Micheal Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida. After a cursory rereading at an age older than 18, I realized how badly I had been deceived.

I just do not buy this idea of "hyperreality", or that somehow media representations meaningfully "distort reality". Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't because of the media). The map is NOT the territory. The medium is NOT the message (or even a "massage", but maybe a "mass age"). I do not deny that a medium has impact on the message, but this notion of it being identical or even worth speaking about as though they are identical is so alien and absurd to me I cannot even figure out where it started.

I will give credit to Marshall Mcluhan for not writing in an insufferable or "fashionable nonsense" style like the others I have compared him to. He is a fine but definitely overrated author.

My grasp on "the medium is the message" is that it's in part a technological-determinism argument. The message a medium will convey, or perhaps the space of messages it may end up conveying in practice, is determined by the nature of the medium itself—how it's created, how it's distributed, how it's experienced—resisting attempts to use it for other purposes. That aspect of it, at least, seems useful and to have some truth to it.

This is interesting - provoking. Can you share some authors/material that has influenced your awakening, so to speak?

I agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st century philosophers dug up classical German/Western philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it. That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank -- grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual integrity (see: Sokal hoax).

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late development of classical German philosophy in particular. It's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions.

This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx in his final Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

The upshot is that the best way to understand writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and interests of the audience? Presume market forces before presuming intellectual rigor.

So you don't think the medium has an effect on how people think about and perceive the world?

I'm not convinced it's a useful abstraction. It is obvious that text vs. pictures vs. sound and so on have different semantic capabilities, e.g. try describing a new color to someone who has never had functional eyes.

However, it is not something I would read or write books exclusively about.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insight%20Po...

What exactly is the abstraction here? McLuhan is describing something very concrete that is not obvious to most people.

I'm interested in how culture changes and where it can go/is going. Knowing about what ideas or forms of thinking different media favor -- this seems useful to me. It's part of the 'selective landscape' of culture.

McLuhan speaks in exaggerated language - it's important to not take everything he says too literally, and to instead judge the essence of the ideas.

"The Medium is the Message" because without context (the media), messages are just noise. McLuhan was all about seeing the contexts we live in, how they shape our reality, etc.

There's a quote I only half remember and am probably misattributing, but my memory is Bruce Sterling saying something like "I used to get excited by reading French postmodern philosophers until I realized they were actually saying something."

I would put it this way: his theory would predict that 140-character twitter would result in a different culture and thought process than Livejournal, and both would be different from Tiktok, which would in turn be different than Twitch - all entirely due to the constraints on the medium. that is a useful theory.

(do I think he probably took too much LSD and got high on his own theories? yes. but its at least adequate as a predictive starting point - and what more can we ask of any model?)

Love the 'fantasy' scene [0] in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's character 'pulls out' Marshall McLuhan to put an intellectual blowhard back into place. McLuhan says, "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work - you mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

Maybe a cameo in a movie meant that McLuhan didn't take himself too seriously. I find his ideas relatively 'approachable', although I'm fairly skeptical whenever reading any philosophical work. Just recently, I had to deal with phenomenological and heuristic approaches to qualitative studies. I see some value, but (as a scientist) the lack of rigor and consistency makes my head spin.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk

After listening to The Medium is the Massage, I thought he was prescient on several things, like everything happening in the now, more information means more patterns to discern, the global village and the ill effects of everyone getting into everyone's business. I didn't follow a few others, like young people really getting into roles because of TV (Shakespeare said it better) and getting the story out of the way to the point of not even having a story somehow leads to more involvement by the viewer and more understanding of the material. That last one is really suspect.

> Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't

You're going to have to explain this one with a quote from him.

Baudrillard doesn't actually think the Gulf war didn't literally occur. He was using trollish language deliberately to highlight his more subtle (but, perhaps, relatively straightforward) ideas that televising the war meant that Americans learning about the wildly mismatched militaries' engagements via TV did not receive in their minds an accurate representation of what really was going on out there. While Baudrillard had a cogent point to make, putting it in these terms all but ensured perpetual confusion about what he meant (as demonstrated by the commenter above you). Here's the Wikipedia summary of Baudrillard's writings:

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl...

Baudrillard's concept of "simulacrum" is connected, and perhaps more interesting, even if attempting to apply it to the world results in weird claims like this one about the Gulf war.

You should give Wittgenstein a try :).

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