Understanding Media, first published in 1964, focuses on the media effects that permeate society and culture, but McLuhan’s starting point is always the individual, because he defines media as technological extensions of the body.

-from Terence Gordon’s short biography of Marshall McLuhan

Social media is transforming media. That’s a simple statement, yet rather profound in its implications. In a flashback, I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, presented in the 1960s, about the Medium being the Message.

The revolutionary nature of social media and the internet is to be found in its unprecedented connectivity. Unlike books or television, the new media of internet communication technology allows individuals to connect directly with hundreds, thousands, or any number they can possibly stand, of other internetized individuals. What you get is a virtual sea full of media consumers and producers.

Let’s take a look at those two aspects of the internetized individual: on the one hand, the role of media consumer, which is an old role for all of us, has been revolutionized by the way which we access and consume media. Each internetized individual has unprecedented access and control over multiple streams of information. For me personally, this has been incredibly liberating. I grew up in an era when the older media of television, newspapers, and books–all of which present information as a lecturer does to an audience–was prolific. Television is the most intimidating and overpowering form of this kind of presentational media: the viewer becomes sedentary, opening up her eyes and ears to the hypnotic patterns coming from the tube.  Televised news is the most terrible and terrorizing form of this. Think of the presentation, both the content and message being received from the viewer of television news:

*dramatic, even martial theme music plays*
Welcome to the jungle news. It’s terrible, by the way, the news. Oh yes, the world is in bad shape. Let me tell you about murders, rapes, wars, natural disasters, and pollution, all of which are, as you know, signs of impending global cataclysm. That means doom. But first, we need to go to commercial.
*a series of intense and emotionally-manipulative moving images and soundtracks are broadcast into the pliant vessels sitting on couches, stoking unnecessary desires*

And perceive this with McLuhan’s view of the media itself being the message: in each of those older media forms, the consumer of media chooses to submit herself to the influence of the media form and presentation. Now this is still the case with internet technology, but I believe that the situation is different in at least two ways. The first way in which an individual’s experience in the connective virtual world of the internet is different from that of the older forms of media comes with the general ease of access (once one establishes an internet connection, which I recognize is not a universal human experience, by far) to a variety of media forms