ABSTRACT
Marshall Mcluhan’s principal aim is to understand how technology, including media technologies, shape and control ‘the scale and form of human association and action’ Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is the highly influential book in which he developed the famous dictum, ‘The Medium is the Message’. To demonstrate the power of media as a key mechanism for historical change, McLuhan considers the transition from pre-modern oral culture, based on the spoken word, to the modern print culture, based on the written word, to the (post)modern electronic culture defined by electronic forms of communication and interaction. The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium.
