Before reading this article, I didn’t have such a deep understanding of the medium. I simply thought that the medium is used to convey information. But McLuhan offers a new perspective that characteristic of all medium means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium, for instance, the content of television is movies, the content of newspapers is words, and the content of words is language. Excluding films, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines that the average person can imagine, McLuhan pointed out that clothing, houses and so on are also media. Everything is the medium, everything is the transmission of information. He also pointed out with great foresight that the truly meaningful message is not the content media of each era suggest to people, but the evolving and changing media themselves, which change the way we transmit and receive information and shape the way we live.
I realized that only after the possession of a certain medium that human beings are likely to engage in communication and other social activities commensurate with it. In the age of agriculture, people passed on information through bronze wares. Only after bronze wares came out did they know what kind of information to record and what kind of information to convey. In the industrial age, human beings transmitted graphic information through newspapers and books, and audio and video information through television and radio. In the information age, people transmit all kinds of information through the Internet. In the new media era, various forms of information have emerged, such as live broadcast, interactive VR and virtual communication. Moreover, the emergence of each kind of media will affect people’s way of thinking. Newspaper era of in-depth reporting and biting criticism makes people think deeply with a critical spirit; In the age of television, people’s thinking ability declines due to the visualization and entertainment. The information explosion in the Internet era is rich and diverse, which makes people’s ability to think in a fragmented and diversified way and reduce their deep thinking mode.