The medium is the message… and you’re a retard.

I work a lot with computers and I often have people walking up to me trying in vain to impress me with their expansive knowledge. Once a month I usually get at least one person approaching me smugly and quipping: "You know… the medium is the message". The annoyance I feel when someone says this is not unlike the annoyance that you feel when someone mentions that "It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity".

In all honesty I am a huge Marshall McLuhan fan and he condensed a lot of his expansive ideas into clever little quotes because envisioned that the majority of the population wouldn’t have the patience to read an entire essay on a subject and needed big ideas ‘summed up’. Sadly I don’t think he envisioned a populace so mind-numbingly stupid that they recite quotes without having any idea of the original meaning.

The general idea is that any new technology (the medium) has a profound effect on the population. However, the true meaningful effect is often not apparent to the population at all, and the actual act of using the medium or what is being transmitted is not important, but the simple act of the medium being there is (the message).

Take the elegant example of the automobile. If you were to ask a layman to list all the ways that an automobile has affected us, he/she might mention things like huge infrastructure created because of the oil economy, the wars it creates, or the huge expressways and roads that have transformed the landscape.

Marshall McLuhan would say no, even though all those issues seem huge, the true ‘message’ of the ‘medium’ of the car how it affect’s people’s sense of privacy. It used to be that people went outside to be alone, and back home to be with people. The automobile has provided people with privacy, intimacy and solitude, so they instead go outside to be with people and back home to be alone. This huge reversal of behaviour is the true effect that the automobile has had on the population and for the most part people did not notice it until far after it occurred.

So what effect does something like the Internet have on us now? Does the Internet make us lose our identities? Nope, McLuhan saw that happening with the advent of radio and TV. What will the Internet give us? And how will we be affected by the fact that we can easily find pictures of lesbian nuns having sex with cows? Nobody knows.

What is known however that all of the information traveling over the internet is really irrelevant when you consider the effects that we can’t see, the ones that are hidden from us that we won’t recognize until much later.

I personally hope they have something to do with lesbian nuns.

Hot ones.