“The Medium Is the Message”

Let’s go back in time to 400 BC, around the time when the act of writing was brand new.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, writes “Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing -- ‘as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age’ -- but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.”

Plato was in favor of this new practice, writing, and Socrates thought it would dilute our thoughts. Does this sound familiar to you? Replace “writing” with “the internet.” 

Carr’s book makes a great case for how the internet is changing our brains, whether we like it or not. His work builds off of Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The title of chapter 1 might be familiar to you, it’s called “The Medium is the Message.” 

McLuhan carefully separates the message being conveyed by the medium from the content relayed by that medium. He writes, “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” Whereas “The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.”

You can even build a pyramid of several mediums on top of each other. Here’s an example I’m fascinated by, football players’ cell phone usage. In 2019, the Washington Post wrote an article about Kliff Kingsbury, the Arizona Cardinals’ first-year head coach, and his plan to give players “cell phone breaks” throughout team meetings. 

Kingsbury said “You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix.” He needed to think one step further. Maybe the problem stemmed from the cell phone itself. 

Carr writes, “Smartphones have become so tied up in our lives that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check a phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking, the authors noted. The fact that most of us now habitually keep our phones ‘nearby and in sight’ only magnifies the toll.”

Maybe Coach Kingsbury thinks the issue involves requiring a social media fix, when the true issue is the proximity of a player’s cell phone.

The fact that John Mayer and Dave Chappelle banned cell phones at their comedy/music shows is commendable. 

Cell phones are just one of many inventions that changed our lives forever. Consider the clock. “The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.”

Now we’ve gone another step further. We’ve truly atomized our time. This is something Naval talked about on the Joe Rogan Experience. There’s now a unit of money attached to the smallest increments of time. 

Let’s narrow our focus on two things that I’ve taken great personal interest in: Twitter and podcasts. Recently I summarized an enlightening episode of Infinite Loops on Twitter and how it has short-circuited the function of gate-keepers. There is now no barrier to entry to take part in certain conversations. Going one step further, podcasts allow us to be a fly on the wall for conversations between the highest level experts. 

It’s easy to be distracted by the “content” on these platforms, but there are great possibilities in store. As McLuhan said, as it relates to “shaping the form of human association,” we should be studying the changes that Twitter, podcasts, and cell phones are bringing to our society.