Quoting Bernard Lam in The Art of Speaking (1696): “A Discourse cannot be pleasant to the Hearer that is not easie to the Speaker; nor can it be easily pronounced unless it be heard with delight.” What’s interesting about this phrase is that it counters a fundamental assumption we seem to make: that what I say isn’t exactly what you hear. What I perceive as good, might not be what you perceive as good. It comes down to how subjective you think reality is. Lam is saying that a sentence that’s good, that you feel good about, will also be felt the same way by whoever you’re talking with. While you may understand the message of my words differently than how I intended them, the quality of the actual words and sentence is never lost in translation. The medium (the words and, at an even lower level, the sounds and articulation) stays the same, while the information assumes a different form. The medium is truth, the information more of a gray area.
This may be why we find body language to be the strongest indicator of how somebody really feels about something: while they may manipulate their words to mask their true state of being (i.e. what mood they’re in, or how they feel about something that’s happened), the means they’re using to communicate these ideas express the bigger picture. That’s how I interpreted the words “the medium is the message:” to really understand a piece of information, not just at face value but also its context and the deeper implications behind it, it’s necessary to look at the means by which it was delivered to you. That’s why reading something via text or email and being told in person are two completely different things: the information is the same, but the medium is different.
I didn’t understand the meaning of the title too well, until I read the quote by Lam, near the end of the text. This helped me put things into context, and I think I understand it better now.