The Message Is The Medium

Marshall McLuhan is famous for the observation that, ‘the medium is the message.’ In other words, the role a medium plays in culture can change the meaning of the message. For example, the BBC is believed by many to be a more credible source of information than Fox News.

The phrase became something of a cliché in the hands of Sixties Mad Men, but it’s worthy of a reappraisal in the context of the digital revolution and social media.

One of McLuhan’s arguments is that media can have a pivotal impact during times of great change. Guttenberg’s invention of movable type and the printing press enabled the shift from a predominantly oral and village culture, to one where ideas and information moved with relative freedom and speed. Would Luther’s Protestant message have so convulsed Europe without the aid of the radical new print medium?

Without the power of pamphlets would there have been a French Revolution? Without posters would the Communists have triumphed over the Tsars? And without the wireless would we have suffered the Nazi tyranny?

The Nazis quickly realised the power of the nascent medium of radio. And to spread their awful message, the Nazis subsidised the production of radio sets, instructing manufacturers to produce Volksempfänger (the people’s receiver) rather than more expensive sets. By the outbreak of the Second World War Germany had the highest household penetration of radios in Europe.

Equally a new medium can promote the end of a conflict. Vietnam was the first television war and visited the nightly horrors of napalm and body bags on the American public. Frustration, shame and grief were emotions that no amount of presidential propaganda could assuage. The Stop the War movement inspired by such television images did just that; it stopped the war

So, what of the digital revolution? Perhaps the newest medium of all, social media, has already made its mark on history by making us all broadcasters. No event is unaccompanied by phone footage shot by a handy ‘civilian’. Nothing of significance is opined without a myriad of digital Caesars giving it the up or down thumb. Today, every storm cloud has a Twitter lining.

Would we have Trump without Twitter? Jezza nearly snatched a post-Brexit victory partly thanks to his team’s digital brilliance. And would we have that most irritating of buzz stereotypes, Millennials, if it wasn’t the first generation whose world has always been digital?

I suspect that social media’s defining impact will be in the future for which, sadly, we only have the medium of the crystal ball.