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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor and media theorist, wrote that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." From our 21st-century perspective, the truth of those words is readily apparent. But in 1962, when McLuhan wrote them, it was a revolutionary new insight. His coinage of the term "global village" came a full thirty years before the rise of the Internet!

After the publication of his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan became something of a celebrity, sought out through much of the rest of his lifetime to offer commentary about the effects of electronic media on society. He was among the big thinkers in the pop culture of his time--compare to, say, Malcolm Gladwell today--a best-selling author, interviewed on television, and profiled in such varied publications as Newsweek, Life, and Playboy.

Perhaps his most famous turn of phrase, from Understanding Media, was that "the medium is the message." He explains that "each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message." The message of a medium is the "change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." "The medium is the message," then, is McLuhan's way of saying that the medium itself produces a meaning to society that is more powerful than any single communication delivered through that medium.

McLuhan died in 1980 and thus didn't live to see the mass adoption of email as a communications medium. But he surely would have had opinions about the ways email has changed our world. I'm no professional media theorist, but I'll list a few of my own observations.

• Email made written communication more personal. Unlike the magazines or newspapers I merely consume, or postal mail sent to my address, my email account is fully "mine".   I control it.  I can pick my own email address, secure it with a password known only to me, and share it only with those I choose.   I can edit my words carefully, and publish whenever I like, to anyone I know.
• Email broke down barriers of time and distance. The old AT&T commercials encouraged us to use long-distance phone calls to "reach out and touch someone."  But that ability came with a price, a cost that increased proportionally according to how far away was the person being called.  Phone calls of that day were also synchronous--you had to catch the other party while they were at home and awake.  Postal mail lacked those constraints, but an exchange of letters could take days or weeks.  With email came the ability to communicate with anyone, asynchronously, regardless of their location, with rapid delivery.
• Email made mass communication cheap. So cheap, that measures had to be taken to ensure its continued usefulness as a medium.  The abuses of spammers led to the development of filters, blacklists, and societal norms about "permission-based" email leading to new laws.   This has happened with other media as well.  For example, the technology that made possible automation of telemarketing gave rise to the "do-not-call" registry.   We now expect new media to protect us from harassment while conferring their other benefits.

In my next post, we'll look at what happens when marketers who use email fail to understand the ways that email has changed how we communicate.   What are the perils of focusing on our own messages while ignoring the larger message that is the medium?

Chris Broshears | Product Development