The medium is the message

What Hacker News says

1. JHerOct 2018
   Whenever I see someone saying something like "just a tool" with regard to technology, I always want to recommend a thorough read of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" ("The Medium is the Message" and other adages).

   I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology.

   The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television.

   Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web.

   One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient.

   I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.

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2. OllinsonFeb 2015
   You might be interested in the works of Marshall McLuhan, specifically The Medium is the Message.

   >McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[6]

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3. JonnieCacheOct 2014
   Are you familiar with Marshall Mcluhan and his "The Medium is the Message" ideas? They would interest you.
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4. brokentoneAug 2014
   McLuhan is one of the most relevant thinkers to our time--if you can figure him out. I've read most of his books, and written several papers on him and still don't quite get it, feel like there are layers of what he was talking about that I may never grasp.

   Entry McLuhan for anyone interested -- The Medium is the Massage, a picture book that originally was a misprint (The Medium is the Message, being the phrase he coined), but he liked it and kept it. Kind feels like reading it is a drug trip, but you start to figure him out.

   Understanding Media -- Seminal work, he lays out the medium is the message, media hot and cold, media as sensory extension, and other concepts as well as catalogues how he sees various media affect us.

   The Mailer/McLuhan debate from CBC is really interesting as well, Mailer as existential/nihilist and McLuhan as nearly an analytic -- neither really talking philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtzxWR-j1xY

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5. pkalerAug 2010
   1) Twitter represents the shift from the static web to the dynamic web (Web 2.0) to the real-time web.

   2) "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford

   3) It's a marketing channel for brands and a low friction communication channel for normals. Wave wasn't built for normals. Google doesn't understand the existence of normals.

   I would suggest reading The Medium Is The Message by Marshal McLuhan. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extens...

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6. cl42Jul 2026
   I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think.

   #1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior appreciation. As per the essay being cited, if you are a CEO committing to AI as a strategy, you will also commit resources to double down on the technology. Your own identity becomes tied to it, whether you realize it or not, and you'll keep pushing for it and maybe even ignore facts that challenge the success of your investment.

   #2: Marshall McLuhan (of "The Medium is the Message" fame) argues that we need to understand communication and entertainment technologies in terms of the structure they impose on us. While social media is seen as a societal ill by many, its original idea of connecting people is fundamentally, well, social... GenAI is very much a non-social (i.e., you experience it on your own) convenience technology. It gives you answers, it writes code, and it implies an authoritative perspective that is always available to you, as an imperfect human. What will this mean for our own identities as human beings?

   I am very much a supporter of foundation models, LLMs, AI, etc. but can't help and think about some of the ideas above. Curious what others think.

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