The Medium is the Message

From AcademicBlogs

The Medium is the Message a library-related academic blog created and maintained by Eric Schnell, Associate Professor and the Head of IT at the Prior Health Sciences Library at The Ohio State University. The blog covers issues relating to library technology, innovation, mananagement, and librarianship in a networked world.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote:

"the personal and socal consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology....it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the content of any media binds us to the character of the medium.

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.

... the medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. "

Not only does the Internet as a medium fit snuggly into McLuhan's concept, blogging is that natural human extension he refers. Blogging did not introduce the concept of personal journaling but it has accelerated and enlarged the scale, pace, and pattern in which the content is introduced into our lives.