In his work Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan’s claims that “the media is the message.” He argues that, while it is intuitive to focus on content while studying communications, the medium in which the content is transmitted can have a more significant impact on society than the content itself. In other words, the technology in which our ideas are communicated influences our behavior more than their content. To McLuhan, we may not even be aware of how certain mediums affect our behavior (“the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carrier by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind”). McLuhan uses his own observations and historical and literary references to argue his point. Some aspects of his argument are more convincing than others. His analysis of the invention of the electric light illuminates perfectly the separation between content from medium and how they both have different influences on behavior. His critique of Professor Wilbur Schramm’s further proves his point that content doesn’t have the same radical effect as medium (“Had his methods been employed in 1500 a.d. to discover the effects of the printed book… he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology…Program and “content” analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge.”).

His most compelling and relevant argument arises when he examines a speech given by General David Sarnoff. McLuhan is right to call this “the voice of the current somnambulism.” We desperately want to believe that our use of a certain technology defines the morality of that technology. The fact that some “initially good” technologies turn out to cause immense harm is a failure on our part to recognize the potential for harm from the technology’s invention. This idea ignores the impact of the medium. The law of unintended consequences does not absolve us of guilt.

The idea that human behavior is influenced by technology (and vice versa) is not a new idea in any sense, and readers should be vary of labeling McLuhan a visionary. McLuhan’s contemporaries were contributing significantly to the field of communications and philosophy of technology decades before he was born (Ernst Kapp, Gunther Anders, and E.M. Forster come to mind). This isn’t to say that McLuhan is wrong. Introduction of new “mediums” to society reliably cause radical behavioral and cultural changes. However, McLuhan’s arguments appear to “admit of no refutation, but produce no conviction” (words borrowed from Hume). It’s difficult to argue against “the medium is the message,” and, yet it’s also difficult to be convinced of it. It isn’t wrong, but his argument feels incomplete and under-supported. It’s not right to call it science as it lacks empirical evidence, but it’s not right to call it philosophy either. The reader asks how? Why? What of it? And the reader is unanswered.