The Medium Is The Message

I read a chapter of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is The Massage. It was difficult for me to unpack all of  what McLuhan is arguing, but going over it a few times, I can see that he's pointing out things we already know. "The medium is the message" is a concept that is supposed to change our ideas of what we actually perceive. McLuhan describes scenarios in which people are more concerned with the medium, or the device that transports an idea or message, than the content that the medium presents to us. He gives an example of a non-English speaker tuning in every night to listen to a BBC news broadcast that he can't understand. Why? Because the medium is the message. Stimuli's effects on us aren't wholly described by how we interpret the content of any medium. You don't get cancer from watching a certain television program, you get cancer from sitting with your face in front of a big light box (i know that it is not proven that t.v. gives you cancer, it was just an example i came up with to support this idea).

McLuhan also brings up an idea that I am interested in. It is that we are surrounded now (even more so now since this book was written in the 60's) by a plethora of mediums that we do not understand at all. In the "information era" we're all too concerned with the content and give no importance or thought to what the medium is. It's interesting, but I actually see it as not that important in the scheme of things. I don't think that McLuhan would realistically argue that we always always always consider the medium the message, period. Content that is expressed by a medium is often more important, I think McLuhan is just trying to illuminate the idea that the medium holds a lot of weight for the "meaning" of any artwork or other stuff...