McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” is an interesting take. Upon first glance, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by this. However, the notion that the way a message is delivered has an impact on how people perceive it is very insightful, and holds true today.

An example of this I have observed is CNN vs. Fox News. Each of these channels has loyal consumers on each respective side of the political spectrum, and the same issues are delivered in a very different light. When it came to issues like the pandemic, Fox News downplayed the severity of the virus in my opinion while CNN reported on it frequently, giving the play by play and having many doctors on the show.

In my experience, CNN viewers who were already cautious of the virus became very afraid, and Fox viewers tended to downplay it or even believe it wasn’t real. This phenomenon that I believe is an issue in our country definitely supports McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message. Though framing is a factor as well, the medium (CNN or Fox) will determine the message, and the audience the message reaches. Even though both may be reporting on COVID-19, I believe this is why so many Americans have such differing opinions on the pandemic and the vaccine.

McLuhan’s electric light example was intriguing as well. He basically says that light is a medium without a message, and that light could be utilized for “brain surgery or night baseball”, which represent different messages.
Neither night baseball or brain surgery would be possible without light, so McLuhan certainly has a point there.

Upon my first read, I honestly thought this was a bit too abstract. What does electric light have to do with communication? But when I gave it more thought, the example is applicable to many other scenarios.

A less abstract example I thought of was that school in the age of the pandemic and online shopping would both be impossible without a computer as a medium. The same medium can have very different messages, but the same messages can’t have the same medium.