“The medium is the message” is a phrase formed by Marshall McLuhan. With this phrase, he believes that the medium influences how the message is perceived. The form of the media is embeds in the message. What I understand, he thinks it is the medium that creates people’s actions and associations and not the opposite. In order to strengthen this, he believes that each medium itself contains another medium. For example, the media of the mobile could be speak.
McLuhan also uses the lightbulb to explain the medium. He describes the lightbulb as a medium without content in itself, but instead it is a social effect. with its effect it creates an environment for people to live in even when it is dark.
He also means that we humans tend to focus on the obvious when the contents of a medium are so clear to us, which means we can miss things and our imagination is limited. Sometimes when a new product is launched, however, there may be a so called “unforeseen consequence” that causes the product to have a different purpose from its origin. An example that I can think of is ”tops”, the white little plastic stick with cotton balls on the sides. What was the purpose of them from the beginning? Was it to clean your ears, removing make-up or something else?
To me, the text is very abstract and I have not really gotten exactly what he means. I really can not understand why we humans always have to make sense of just everything and divide and place everything in different categories for what we think it may mean. I suppose we want to be in control and just understand everything. I guess it might be useful to analyze texts like this in order to develop our thoughts and how to look at things.