I recently saw A Strange Loop, the Pulitzer-winning musical by Michael R. Jackson on Broadway. In short, it is a play about a play, a musical about writing a musical more specifically. This sort of meta-approach to artistic expression harkens back to Thomas Kyd’s 1592 play The Spanish Tragedy which features a mise-en-abyme and greatly inspired Shakespeare’s later metadramas. One could even go as far as One Thousand and One Nights, the famous compilation of Middle Eastern folk tales, another example of a story about telling a story. This approach which centers the medium as the nexus of artistic creation seems in direct accord with McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message”. 

But is that statement true?

The fault in McLuhan’s argument is his rebuttal General David Sarnoff whom he quotes as having saying “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bd; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” In the essay, McLuhan asserts that the “content” is trivial in comparison to the “medium”, which is the true cause of the “personal and social consequences”.  He later claims, in his electrical light example, that “whether the light is being use for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference”. Unfortunately, McLuhan does not recognize the telos of content, that is to say its goal or purpose. For instance, it matters that the content printed and disseminated on the new printing presses in the late 18th century were revolutionary texts and not romance novels. I am form Haiti where light and electricity are extremely scarce, therefore it matters that we use electrical light for surgeries and not baseball. Though it is a technological improvement to monks copying texts, it takes time and resources to print something and both are restricted. Every piece of content is a decision and, in a world of scarcity, every decision requires a tradeoff. 

That is not to say that we do not learn anything new by analyzing the medium, but rather that we must understand that the medium is a vector of information that is controlled and that certain things are allowed to be printed and some are not. A study of what that content is, what constraints are imposed on it is as important as a study of the medium. The content (or lack thereof) is also the message! A good and more modern example could center on the information that one is allowed to post or not on social media. Similarly, between 1922 and 1945, the Hays Code governed what was and was not allowed in American motion pictures. 

Stuart Hall in Encoding/Decoding elucidates this very important relationship between the “technical infrastructure” which McLuhan calls the medium and the “relations of production”. There is a “labour process”, to borrow from Marx’s Capital, involved in the production and construction of said “content” and to focus on just the medium is to obscure that relationship and to obscure that relationship is to forego incredible insight into what messages are being encoded, by whom and for what purpose.