Understanding Media

What Hacker News says

1. relativeadvJul 2026
   > "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"

   I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

   tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).

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2. adityaathalyeApr 2026
   Feels like somebody has read their Marshall McLuhan :) I recently started reading Understanding Media, and every chapter delivers at least one mind-melting moment; something he draws attention to and/or frames in some way.
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3. viccisApr 2026
   It's confusing because "message" is not using its lay meaning, and decades of "medium" and "media" meaning drift meant that it isn't either.

   For "the medium is the message", "medium" refers to any tool that acts as an extension of yourself. TV is an extension of your community, even things like light bulbs (extends your vision) are included in his meaning.

   McLuhan argued that all forms of media like that carry a message that's more than just their content. "The message" in that argument refers to the message the medium itself brings rather than its content. For example, the airplane is "used for" speeding up travel over long distance, but the the message of its medium itself is to "dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for."

   You can see it happening via online media that extend ourselves across the internet. Think of how, once easy video creation via Youtube became uniform, web comics stopped becoming a popular medium for comedy online. It's not like the web comics faded because they got worse; it's that they faded into a niche format because people didn't want to communicate via static images anymore. Or how, once short form videos on TikTok got big, you saw other platforms shift to copy the paradigm. McLuhan's point is that it's not just the content of those short form videos that matters; it's the message of the format itself. Peoples' attention spans grow shorter because of the format, and before too long, we saw the tastes and expectations of the masses change. Reddit's monosite-with-subcommunities format and dopamine triggering voting feedback mechanism were its message more than any actual content posted there, and it's why traditional forums are niche and dwindling.

   If you want to get a pretty good understanding of it, just read the first chapter from his book Understanding Media. It's short and relatively straight forward.

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4. adityaathalyeMar 2026
   > ... in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

   Must quote the last paragraph of Chapter 2: "Hot and Cold media", from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which I've double-underlined.

   For it simultaneously explains to me; TikTok (quick consume-scroll-like-react-"create" dopamine hit cycles) and LLMs (outsourcing the essential mechanical friction of thinking (which requires all senses, for me at least))...

   The essential friction of deliberate, first-party speech-making---misspellings and all---is why voice and conversation contains life.

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5. phbaDec 2025
   > AI enables precision influence at unprecedented scale and speed.

   IMO this is the most important idea from the paper, not polarization.

   Information is control, and every new medium has been revolutionary with regards to its effects on society. Up until now the goal was to transmit bigger and better messages further and faster (size, quality, scale, speed). Through digital media we seem to have reached the limits of size, speed and scale. So the next changes will affect quality, e.g. tailoring the message to its recipient to make it more effective.

   This is why in recent years billionaires rushed to acquire media and information companies and why governments are so eager to get a grip on the flow of information.

   Recommended reading: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. While it predates digital media, the ideas from this book remain as true as ever.

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6. viccisDec 2025
   >I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.

   I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.

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