Is the medium really the message? It's the age-old question of mass communication theory. Well, maybe not age-old. I guess it really dates back to the 1960s when Marshall McLuhan posed the question on talk shows and scholarly papers alike. At first, this concept might seem vague and indeed a lot to grasp. "The medium is the message." It sounds so daunting. What McLuhan was really asking was, do we shape the medium used in communication, or does the medium shape us?
McLuhan argues that what has been communicated is less important than how it is communicated. The medium is more important than anything else that can change society as a whole. Is the form that you receive a message as significant as the message itself? If you are Carrie Bradshaw, you might agree.
In season 6 episode 7, Carrie wakes up one morning to find her boyfriend has broken up with her. She didn't get a goodbye text, phone call, or even conversation in person. But instead, she found her bed empty and a post-it note sitting on her computer. "I'm sorry. I'm out. Don't hate me." This is how her boyfriend broke up with her. A post-it-note!!! Carrie was not too particularly upset about the breakup as a concept since she and her fellow writer boyfriend had been having issues all season. But she and the girls could not get over the medium he chose to send the message. A post-it-note!!! If I was Carrie, I think I would agree with McLuhan after that experience. The form in that you receive a message as, if not more, significant as the message itself
Thankfully I am not Carrie Bradshaw, so I don't necessarily think McLuhan was correct with his idea of Technological Determinism. McLuhan thought that a society dominated by electronic media would look completely different than a society dominated by print or one dominated by oral media. He also believed that the way society progressed was a direct result of the form of media we consumed.
Humans are much more nuanced than that. I believe society forms the type of technology much more often than technology develops us. We can see this in the push to keep social media sites like Facebook and Instagram at the top of the app food chain, but TikTok is constantly outperforming. McLuhan's ideas also do not take into consideration once we develop ting around fires, but newspapers still exist, and many trust them over electronic media. Most newspapers can be read online and are filled with the same content as the printed version. There are professional storytellers, radio is still kicking it, and podcasts have taken over my generation. Just because we get a new shiny way to communicate does not mean we lose our roots in the old forms.
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