The book that made this idea famous opens with its type printed backwards, so that you have to hold it up to a mirror. This page does the same. McLuhan first said that the medium is the message in 1958, and he kept turning the idea over, in his own words, until 1979. What follows is every version, dated and sourced.
The medium of print is the message.
May 1958. Vancouver.
Radio in the Future of Canada, UBC.
This was the first public utterance. A pencilled note in his own hand fixes it to this date. He said it to reassure broadcasters that television could not end radio.
We should long ago have discovered it.
26 May 1958. Washington, D.C.
Conference on Educational Television.
He said it again within weeks of Vancouver, this time to educational broadcasters. The effect of reading, he argued, outweighs anything printed on the page.
The message is the change of scale, pace or pattern that it introduces.
1964. Understanding Media, chapter 1.
This is the first and largest unfolding of the phrase. The same book casts the artist as a kind of radar, an early warning system that senses a new technology before it numbs the rest of us.
Massage.
The title was a typesetter’s slip that he chose not to fix, because massage was truer than message. With Quentin Fiore he built the idea into the object itself. As they put it, all media work us over completely.
1967. The Medium Is the Massage.
With Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel.
The medium is what happens to you.
That is its message.
1967. The Weekend Telegram.
This is his most stripped-down phrasing. He put it plainly. It is a process, and it does things to you. The medium is not a channel that carries content. It is an event that happens to the user.
Societies are shaped by the nature of their media.
March 1969. The Playboy interview.
Here he was at his clearest, writing for a general audience. As he said in the same interview, I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand.
The medium provides
the message.
It is a program of effects.
1973. The Medium Is the Message, rewritten.
A decade later he returned to his own chapter. He recast the medium as an environment of services, whose real output is the change it works on our senses.
The user is the content.
The effects come before the invention.
c. 1974. The figure and ground turn.
This was his last reframing. The medium is not the figure but the ground. It is not the motor car but the highways and factories that the car brings. He asks us to look past the message to the environment it quietly builds.
08Then he never
said it again.
A stroke in the autumn of 1979 took his speech. He died on the last day of 1980, the thirty-first of December, in the year CNN went on the air. Some pages are intentionally left blank.
—Now it is our turn
to restate it.
If the artist works like radar, reporting a new environment before the rest of us feel it, then the timeline does not end in 1979. It rolls forward. This is an invitation to restate the message for the media McLuhan never saw. A few of the people who have already tried appear below, and the list keeps rolling.
Quotations are short, attributed excerpts, held under copyright by the McLuhan estate and gathered here for study.