The Medium is the Message

On turning to the 'Work in Progress' [Finnegans Wake] we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless the form is so strictly divorced from the content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. ... Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.


Samuel Beckett, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,"
in Our Exagmination Round His Factification
For Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929

The Medium is the Message?

via: James Morrison

The Medium is the Message: Exercise in Gestalt Psychology

If you speak of the car as a medium, you are no further ahead because the car is no more than a figure detaching itself from a service environment of expressways, oil companies, automobile assembly lines, etc. The real medium, in the case of the car, is the totality of services it creates, or, better yet, the huge change that it creates in the human community. The car as the figure is not the message.


For North Americans, the hidden ground, the real message, of the car is what it does with our sense of privacy. The effect is different in Europe, but the car for us has been largely created to insure our privacy; in other words, the car's message is privacy, intimacy, and solitude. Privacy is made possible by the large network of highways, the biggest architectural structure in the history of the world which, by contrast, makes the pyramids and the Great Wall of China seem small. The car itself is no more than a figure in this service environment.


Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, Second Conversation with Pierre Babin, 1977