In This Age of Social Media, What Would Marshall Think?

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was required course reading during my freshman year as a Journalism major many years ago. Dutifully, I read the monumental book which was written in 1964, assigned chapter by assigned chapter. McLuhan’s thoughts were provocative and broached an intellectual frontier that I’d not yet encountered. He spoke of the media in terms of “hot” or “cool,” and assigned simple, yet sensorially explicit words to define the media.  A hot medium, if I recall correctly, is one that saturates our senses with information (radio, print, cinema); a cool medium is one that provides us with far less information (telephone, comic books, television) requiring our active participation to fill in the blanks.  

In all honesty, I didn’t really know what he was talking about then, and I am not sure that I fully understand now. But, one of the book’s key concepts, that I along with countless others, will never forget, is “The medium is the message.” What that means, according to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, is “that the form of a medium imbeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived, creating subtle change over time.”

OK, I get it!  The medium is what shapes and controls the way we view the messages we receive.  So today, nearly 45 years after his thoughts were first published, McLuhan’s analysis of how the media affects society and culture is dependent on the communication process by which an individual receives a message, rings true.  

McLuhan could not have possibly imagined the technological bombardment of communication vehicles with which we are faced today. We walk around with little plugs embedded in our ears, wires attached to our hips, personal data assistants nestled in the palm of our hands and the entire world within our reach and on demand, at our command 24/7. The amount of information we are capable of receiving at any given moment is dizzying, and the plethora of communications vehicles in which we receive that information is equally daunting.  Talk about information overload!

Based upon the never-ending stream of advertising messages we receive, it would appear that we, as consumers of knowledge, are over-stimulated, and under-prepared to keep pace with the information, information choices, products and product choices that face us. How do we separate the message from the medium by which it is conveyed?  Is this even possible? What’s the point?

As stated by Dr. Megan Mullen, an associate professor of communication and director of the Humanities Program at the University of Wisconsin, “McLuhan accurately observed dramatic changes in advertising and public relations practices during the later part of the twentieth century. For no longer are commercial messages about providing detailed product information, as they once were.”  In fact, in today’s 21st century marketing world, serious information on a product or service is frequently omitted in favor of verbal or visual messages that strike an emotional response from the intended audience and compel them to act.  

This is the age of instant information. Through the Internet we are all members of an electronic universe – perhaps we are the inhabitants of a Global Village, another notion coined and predicted by Marshall McLuhan. We have become programmed to act and react at the hyper-kinetic speed of the electronic information we receive. In an era of information explosion, a marketer’s success may rely more on the survival of the fastest, rather than survival of the fittest.

Here’s a relevant example.  Recently, Presidential hopeful Barack Obama announced his running mate by text message and e-mail.  The candidate, a top-of-mind favorite of the young, the restless and the hopeful, eschewed traditional press, and chose to first reveal his choice for running mate via e-mail and text messages to supporters. This is a first – no other campaign has ever chosen to reward its loyal supporters with such monumental  “insider” news – before it hits the front page.  

Brilliant!!  Not only has Obama demonstrated a mastery of understanding and using powerful Social Media tools to engage and expand his public, but his strategy, remarkably both exclusive and inclusive, is also totally in sync with his brand as the generational “change candidate” -- it’s modern, innovative, transparent, and accessible.

In this new communications era, now being referred to as the “Age of Engage,” everything is happening at once.  Technology has blurred the line between the medium and the message. Although he did not live to see the likes of shared communication concepts like Twitter, or social-media communication options like Text Messaging, Marshall McLuhan was right – the message and the medium are one and the same.