The Medium is the Massage (classic cover)
If you are an engineer and don’t like #noemail and dismiss the change of the context and environment in which a message is transmitted and received — you know who you are the guy who comes up to me and says, “text is text. a message is a message. form and context make not difference.” –, you need to revisit Marshall McLuhan. Or if you have ten minutes, you would profit from listening to Benjamin Walker talk with Douglas Coupland, Eric McLuhan and others.

Especially interesting — to those of us who love the McLuhan books — is the story behind the title of his groundbreaking book, “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.”

See also Douglas Coupland’s thoughtful entry on McLuhan as seen today “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today”

Money quote from McLuhan via Coupland:

“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” McLuhan 1962

Happy 100th Birthday, Marshall McLuhan.

You Know Nothing of My Work (Annie Hall)

My next message will be a singing telegram.