Just like the title, āThe Medium is the Messageā, Marshall McLuhan points out the relationship between āmediumā and āmessageā. I started out quite lost in the piece of reading but I started to understand after the example of chicken and eggs, āInstead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an eggās for getting more eggsā (McLuhan 154). It all falls down to how it is conveyed that affects us. Ultimately, the most important thing is how the mediums forms and controls, leading to the effect on our lives.
Furthermore, as technology progresses and medium develops, it impacts human-thinking differently. For instance, when I am young I would only know that communications happen when we talk face to face. After that, technology develops and I am introduced to phone calls. Then a few years later, those phones turn into smartphones that we could text. Ultimately, it is evident that those new technologies affect the mediums which in turn change the whole society. For instance, having family gatherings and dinners are no longer completely talking, but rather composes of people using their phones for various reasons. Thinking about it, it is kind of ironic that these mediums bring us closer to each other by texting rather than seeing, but sometimes it is distancing us further away as we are no longer truly interacting. This explains why societies today prefer to text rather than call or meetup.
The main takeaway I got from this reading is that we should recognize how the different mediums affect us. We shouldnāt allow this medium to take control of our lives, our behaviours, and our perceptions.