“The Medium is the Message” Interpretation

Purpose Statement: This blog post is an analyzation of Marshall McLuhan’s article “The Medium is the Message,” for the Writing 310 class.

For class, we had to read this document written by Marshall McLuhan, called “The Medium is the Message.” It was a little bit hard to read, but I think that I was able to understand what it means. McLuhan says that in communicating, the “medium,” or the way that the information is transmitted, can be more important than the “message,” or the information itself. He uses the example of an “electric light,” and how the light itself is far more important than whether it is being used for a brain surgery or night baseball.

For my example, I’ve chosen the difference of a handwritten letter versus an email. We receive probably at least twenty emails a day: from school or work to social media sites, from companies advertising products to politicians asking for donations. The medium of an email is something that we’re all very familiar with. We scan the professional language and respond if necessary, but ultimately many of the emails just go unread or un-cared about. Physical mail as a medium is very different. When you hold something in your hand, it already seems far more real to you than letters on a screen. And when someone wrote you a letter by hand instead of sending it instantaneously through the internet, it implies care and effort. It takes far more time to sit down, write something on paper, stick it in an envelope, place a stamp, put it in the mailbox, and wait for it to arrive, than to type some words on a computer and click a button. No matter what the letter or email contains, it means very different things depending on the medium.