The Medium is the Message

McLuhan certainly approaches media in a way I haven't quite thought about. Is the medium more important than message it carries? Personally, I don't agree with McLuhan, but I do think he brings up some clever examples to support his belief. His analogy of light as a medium that carries no content in its pure form, but that it can be manipulated into signs and advertisements and THEN have content, was very interesting. McLuhan explains that different formats of media have their own character, and that it is "the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action" (203). I do agree with that point; there is a different sort of "personality" or legitimacy of information depending on how it is presented. For example, people would probably trust news they read in a printed newspaper article more than they would something posted from a person's Twitter account. 

And I can see how media has definitely changed the speed and scale at which communication happens, what with so many TV shows, ads, radio channels, and social media outlets, information  can spreads quite fast. McLuhan goes on to describe all this “electric media” as an “inundation” (206). That I can agree with. However, I just do not really believe that the medium is more important than the content. I mostly see the medium as a tool to spread the content, but the content is still the main object.