In Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message,” he makes the argument that it is important to consider the medium as its own entity that has meaning apart from the media or message that it transmits. He introduces excerpts from Shakespeare early in this essay to make the point that the act of innovating new mediums of communication can completely change the media landscape in unpredictable ways. For example, the invention of photography as a medium in the early 1800s can be interpreted as a method of surveillance though its wide use in the criminal justice system and in the pseudoscience of phrenology. Through these social circumstances, photography develops a history of prejudice and racism that attributes meaning to the medium. This supports McLuhan’s idea that mediums are not neutral vessels that suddenly gain meaning through the intent of the user or the message transmitted by the user.
To apply McLuhan’s concept of the medium to modern society, it is impossible to not make the connection to the technologies that have altered our social interactions, consumption of information, and our overall perspective on the world. As demonstrated in “The Machine Stops,” once society has adapted to living within a network of machinery and technology, the information that is communicated through the machine is secondary to the large-scale adjustments that have been made to our thinking as a society. Communication technologies have reorganized and restructured modern society to function within these medias that have become extensions of ourselves. It is easy to become absorbed within the mediums of modern media, but as a society, we should continue to question the cultural and philosophical implications that these mediums impose onto global civilization.