The medium is the message: a technology’s form reshapes perception and society more than any content it carries.
The longer story
'The medium is the message'—McLuhan's famous slogan meant that how communication happens transforms us more than what gets communicated. Print creates linear, individual consciousness; electronic media create the 'global village.' He was writing about television in the 1960s, but his insights about how technologies reshape perception feel prophetic for digital media. For research on any mediated practice, McLuhan insists: don't just study content; study what the medium itself does to thought, sense, and social relation.