Marshall McLuhan with "Medium is the Massage" and "Understanding Media"
Marshall McLuhan wrote his book “The Medium is the Massage” in 1967 and received quick notoriety from it. the medium is the message. Ultimately, he wanted to convince people to start questioning the effects of the mediums that we were using to convey information instead of the message itself. McLuhan argued that the focus of study should be the technologies that are used to transfer content because ultimately they would have a greater effect on humans individually and as a society.
In a second book called “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, he explains these paradigm shift between mediums of communication: oral culture, print culture, and electronic culture. Oral culture was when people sent messages solely through the use of mouths and ears. Stories were passed on from generation to generation and were never written down and McLuhan says that this causes the human body to favor the ear to process this information. The next big leap in history was print culture, where newspapers were being published on a large scale and books were being read by more and more people. The industrial revolution that took place around the most advanced parts of the world brought about the first evidence of mass communication, or what McLuhan saw as the first large scale use of a medium outside of our own minds: an extension. Print culture favored the eye because it caused people to read instead of listen, so the balance of the dominant sense in our brain shifted from the ear to the eye.
This paradigm in media, McLuhan claims, also favored not just the eye but individualism. He thought this because reading was an individual action, done in isolation, and allowed for humans to create independent thought due to the multiple meanings of the messages in this medium. The messages being words. Words have many, many different meanings but only a few or maybe even one is necessary when reading, the search is simply narrowed down by context. But the next culture that McLuhan deals with is thought to have a much different effect: electronic culture. The TV was only 40 years old at the time and popular programs began to sprout such as the now very well known Star Trek. This new culture favored not one sense but a combination of multiple ones. The eye and the ear were being favored at the same time and McLuhan argued that because this was an even greater means of mass communication, the effect on our society was unification, but at a cost. He argued that people were closer together, watching programs and movies together, but this caused us to conform. Another aspect of the unity was the literal unification of the use of more than one sense in the brain.