The Medium is the Massage ...

McLuhan with a television showing his own image, 1967

This terrific pix of MM indirectly reflects just how far ahead of his time he truly was as he understood the power of media just as Paddy Chayefsky did in the early 70s. For McLuhan, it was far more than "The medium is the message" but rather about what media could become and how it could change how man viewed himself within that fearsome construct. 

The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. “Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us,” he said during a television appearance. “At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.” That’s exactly what it feels like to spend time on TikTok or X—and was said by someone who died in 1980.

When viewed in the context of Network, McLuhan's take was prescient to a fault.

In McLuhan’s day, the harmful technology was television. Although the medium brought people back to their tribal origins—both literally together in their living rooms and experiencing the same images from around the world—it was thought to be vapid and draining. Most importantly, McLuhan knew that television would soon be replaced by another, more inclusive medium—but his predictions of something like the internet fell on skeptical ears.

McLuhan likened our contemporary ills to the often misunderstood myth of Narcissus. The point of the story “is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves,” resulting in “the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness.” McLuhan believed that whatever technology we use—in his time, telephone, telegraph, radio, or television—surrounds us in a certain environment. We change how we communicate, and how we think, because of that environment. And because we are steeped in those environments, we often don’t realize that we are making changes

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