Analysis of McLuhan theory

With this assay I don’t want to review the whole theory of McLuhan but I want to focus my analysis in one point of his theories that strongly call my attention: medium is the message. My intention is not discuss the theories but apply the analysis on the Internet, and see what are the implications, if any.

The medium is the message

The question that I want to address is: if the medium is the message, then what is the message of Internet? The message, in McLuhan theory, means the personal and social transformation due to the media, or in other words, the extension of ourselves due to the new technology. Lets review some of the examples that McLuhan mentions on the explanation of the theory. To understand the meaning of the message, he picks up the example of the railway. In this example, he mentions “the railways did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but accelerate and enlarge the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure”. Tacking this example I would like to analyse what are going to be the personal and societal changes of the Internet.

How Internet is going to transform the society? And how Internet is going change the personal attitudes? These are the key questions to understand the meaning of Internet in McLuhan theory. The transformation of society is not an easy task to think, the first signs of change is that the amount of information available and the speed to disseminate this information has increase dramatically. Previous to the Internet development the media channels were expensive and normally under control of states and few individuals. Internet opened the possibility to easily disseminate information in a low cost. The future implication is a fragmented information society, not only dependent of big media groups, but also of individuals and organizations that has different view points and opinions.

In other hand, Internet can also help in the democratisation of society, or in a new concept of democracy. People can individually manage local authorities and governments. The dual channel of the Internet allows individuals to make proposals and control closely the administration and decide upon the budgets and decisions of the authorities. Therefore, the new media allows new political systems with more involvement of the population to decide on collective future, in contraposition with the current political body that sometimes is far from the needs of the citizens.

The new media, internet, is allowing to workers not to move every day to physical locations to develop their job, but can stay at home or travelling while doing their assignments. The social implications of these transformations are huge: leave in a natural environments, then reduction of the housing in big cities, less transport time required, reduction of the energy and contamination, new ways of organizing the jobs, less control and more accountability.

There are many other implications of the development of the Internet society in the business side and in the personal side as well, here I have only review just a few society changes. But it is clear that if medium the is message, as McLuhan affirms, then Internet is going to have a strong message to the society. The transformations on society are potentially enormous.