The medium is the message

In my mind, “The medium is the message” got several meanings.

First is that people can know about the message through medium before they know about the content inside. Another is how media affect people’s life, thinking or culture.

For me, I agree some of the point that McLuhan said.

I agree that media affect people’s life and thinking, media can change people's thinking through their platform. For example, pirate was bad image in people’s mind before, like piracy off the coast of Somalia. They do rob, they set fire and they are murder also. But now on TV or films, pirate are nice people, they are funny, they loyal to the people who are nice to them. Media makes people think pirate are not as bad as the think before. Media now got the power to control how people think about one thing.

"Never judge a book by its cover". I don't really agree McLuhan that "never mind the content". For poster or photo, people can know what they mean when they just saw that image without explain. But for video, they can’t just know what do that video deeply mean without watching the whole video. We can know that person is happy when they saw he smile, but we can't just saw the name of a film and know what the film want to told. We can't miss the content of the video as the meaning will be inside the film and we need to feel it while you watch.

So for some points, I don't really agree with McLuhan as in some medium, you can't miss the content.

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Student: Harry Lau Hoi Ming