The Medium is the Message

When Marshall McLuhan stated that “the medium is the message” he was stating something that should have been completely obvious to us all—that with each new medium that is introduced, it comes from something that previously existed. As I was reading this piece by McLuhan, I couldn’t help but think of Facebook, and the juggernaut it has become. Before Facebook came LiveJournal, MySpace, and most importantly, the internet. But all of this is overlooked by the small fact that Facebook has become this bruit force that is able to reach 100’s of millions of people in countries that one probably didn’t even know had internet, and everyone seems to overlook how Mark Zuckerberg could even come up with something like this. It’s as if people think that he didn’t have the history of the medium he was using to create such a revolutionary communicative device. McLuhan stated “many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message” (McLuhan 203). And while this is true to an extent, a clear history of the medium is how all of our current information is able to rise.