A medium's form reshapes society more than any content it carries.
McLuhan's 1964 formulation, and the standard illustration is the electric light: it has no content at all and reorganised the working day, the city and the night.
In practice
- A committee that moves from letters to email answers more questions, less carefully, for more people, and nobody decided any of that.
- The telephone carried whatever people said and abolished the distinction between being at home and being reachable, which was the actual change.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience