Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message” at the beginning of his book “Understanding Media“.  I think that perhaps most of you reading this site have heard the phrase and maybe some of you have heard of McLuhan, but I would venture to guess that if you’re like most people, you haven’t actually read the book.  I admit I am guilty of that myself, even though it sits at home on my library bookshelf waiting for the day that I can get to it.

The article I linked to in the last paragraph about that famous statement discusses the fact that people rarely understand what Mr. McLuhan was saying when he wrote it.  He was saying, in a nutshell, that while the specific message of a specific medium (such as a particular play or television show) is about a particular event or topic, the message of a class of media like “television programs” or “movies” or “websites” is to be found in the network effects or “unanticipated consequences” of the presence of the medium in human culture. 

I’m not talking about this because I want to discuss dry academic theory about information or invention in human society, but because McLuhan’s brief synopsis is the key to understanding the world we’re living in today and I have never been more keenly aware of it.  The message of the Internet and the rest of the digital communications revolution that has taken place over the last two decades is of profound import to all of us.  It has nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with cellular phones, nothing to do with email or any of the enabling technologies that have created this new medium that I would summarize as “digital connectivity”.  The message is far more complex and far subtler.  So complex and subtle, that I doubt any of us can summarize it or even be sure we “get it”.

In January 22, 1984 Apple Computer showed a television commercial, based on George Orwell’s book 1984, at the Superbowl half-time break.  It ran one time and people are still well aware of it 23 years later.  It wasn’t just because the commercial itself was powerful and arresting, it was because the product that followed it, the original Macintosh, really did change the world.  As Steve Wozniak (the co-founder of Apple) said a little while back, “every computer is a Macintosh”.  By this he means that the mouse, windows, icons, networking, sound, and basic desktop metaphor for interacting with a computer that was first commercialized by the Macintosh constitute the standard computing experience of all major computing platforms today, Windows, Linux, or otherwise.  That commercial showed independence, defiance, a shattering of the old order…  it said nothing about computers.  They were advertising a product, but in a very real way they were also anticipating a shift in mediums in which the message would become about individuality and even chaos.

It seems, maybe, that it was a long time from the original Mac to the introduction of the World Wide Web, but it was a brief 6 years.  It was in 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee, working on his NeXT computer, invented the World Wide Web.  The Web is not the Internet, but it is to the Internet in the 1990′s what The Beatles were to British rock bands in the 1960′s.  It is the perfect storm, the medium that changed our world.  The Web is what most people mean when they say “the Internet”.  The ‘Net may have existed before the Web, but it was never the same afterwards.

The combination of user-friendly computers with a worldwide communications system has caused countless upheavals in our culture and each of them has been a specific piece of a larger message.  The rise and fall of Napster was a piece.  Clinton-Lewinsky was a piece.  September 11 was a piece.  Even Lindsay Lohan’s crotch is a piece.  Unintended consequences and network effects are everywhere.  The digital revolution is taking apart and reassembling our world and our view of it at a pace that is truly difficult to fathom.  There are new twists every day.  Apple’s 1984 ad has been digitally “mashed up” by anonymous people to be a political ad in favor of Barack Obama and against Hillary Clinton.  Paul McCartney has signed on with the new Starbuck’s record label.  Everywhere you look, things are strange.

Why?  What’s the message?  If the medium is the message, what are we supposed to be gathering from the massive social, political, economic and cultural changes that have flowed out of the proliferation of digital technology on our streets, in our homes, and in our hands? 

I don’t know, but I have a few guesses, a few candidate messages, if you will.  For one thing, humans like simplicity, duality.  They like absolutes.  Black and white.  Good and bad.  Right and wrong.  The true understanding that those absolutes are illusory used to be something that was confined to the realm of philosophers and intellectuals, but no more.  Now we can all see.  Our celebrities are fragile, stupid, humans, just like the rest of us.  They just have the difficult (albeit lucrative) job of trying to sell us an illusion so we can pretend they’re somehow superhuman.  The same is true of our politicians, our leaders.  They are flawed, vulnerable, incapable of earning our respect as authorities.  Is any of this new?  No.  We’ve just put the world into too small a box under too big a microscope.  The digital revolution has revealed for us, for even the dullest who are not insulated from it by self-imposed digital exile or poverty, that life is far from absolute, far from simple.  There are no paragons of virtue and authority, no guys in white hats, just chaos, unintended consequences, and a lot of our fellow primates working to do what they think is best with what little time and knowledge they have.  Maybe the message of this medium is something else.  Maybe by putting us all so close to each other in so many odd ways it has taught us once again that civilization is some sort of collective delusion by showing us just how absurd it all is.

I don’t know.  I’m not some omnipotent being sitting above our globe, watching the flow of information and time and events and pondering the philosophical implications of it all.  I’m just a guy writing on a blog who sees pieces going by.  I see revisionist historians, right-wing quacks, celebrity meltdowns, pointless wars, left-wing panderers, digital demagogues, YouTube celebrities, a laughing-stock government, and a world that more and more resembles a giant ball of Jello (“a mono-color mass!  poke it here, it wiggles everywhere!”) instead of the pattern of divided solid colors of countries and continents that were on the globe in my school classroom growing up.  Far away places seem closer than ever, more accessible, more understandable.  The politicians and celebrities seem more approachable, more imperfect, more human.  Even though the Buddhists have been saying it for years, this medium has finally made the message accessible to everyone.  We are all alone, yet we are all connected.  There are no gods or heroes among us who are any more or less human than ourselves.  There are no enemy nations, no ideological wars, just complicated intertwining histories with differing viewpoints, woven together into a world that will just keep exposing it’s complexity to us. 

I have no idea if I’ve touched on the actual message.  But it’s how it looks to me.

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RyanSutter has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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