Week 9// The Medium is the Massage // Marshall McLuhan


Marshall McLuhan was a revolutionary in his own right, yet it seems apparent that his work was not fully realised, he was essentially documenting the evolution of media, and its potential grip on society influencing how we learn and interact with one another.

For this session we were tasked to do something different, rather than have a book prescribed for us to read by a specified author, we were encouraged to go an exploratory journey through the medium of YouTube not quite knowing where we would be led as we delved into Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The medium is the Massage’. I would say I thoroughly enjoyed this task, Marshall proposed very compelling and fascinating concepts emphasising on how technology was becoming an extension of man. 

In my own exploration I was led through a series of videos in discussion on how as technology advances, we in turn are dumbed down by its advances no longer thinking for ourselves, a view somewhat echoed in previous blogs although from a slightly different angle by Mathew Crawford as he highlights the separation of thinking from doing, in today's world it is the technical advances that we currently enjoy which have encouraged this separation to some degree.


Understanding Media, a book that propelled Mcluhan, portrays his investigation into media, focusing on the media effects that permeate society and culture. The above quote “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us” is echoed by his defining of media as “technological extensions of the body”. You can certainly see evidence of his work in society, clearly media as a medium has infiltrated the lives of individuals, especially the younger generations.

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