THE MESSAGE BENDS THE MEDIUM A three-part reflection on McLuhan and contemporary media environments.
Part I — Iterations, Originality, and the Medium as Environment This article is a personal reflection on McLuhan’s work, engaging with his ideas as a point of departure rather than a closed theoretical framework. The text explores how his insights resonate within the contemporary, algorithm-driven media environment. We live in the moment of breakthroughs that will define the iterations. It’s not comfortable, I won’t lie. I have this thing buzzing in my inner ear, this urge to tell them a thing or two, these LLMs. But I’d be a hypocrite, because one of them just translated this text from Romanian into English. Prompt work is real work. Everything can be reproduced / reformatted / recycled / reiterated. Battalions of mini XCOPYs dressed as Spiderman pointing their fingers at each other, years from now, asking one another to show the their ERC-721 smart contract badge.
Originality feels that it takes a step back though. The intrinsic search that once stood at the beginning of the creative process becomes translucent. Often, it turns into a bad joke or a cliché, or if we’re lucky, a passing meme once every red-candle quarter. It still floats around, more like a decorative transcendence, something you’re supposed to admire from behind the glass casing. Something to praise when it appears mostly because of its scarcity, not for its content. Definitely not something to pursue. It’s not feasible anymore. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I don’t see the whole picture, but I can hear it from afar.
Originality, in descending increments, no longer functions either as a goal or as a destination. At best, it appears by accident, not as intention. More than sixty years ago, McLuhan wrote Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), the big-picture statement being that the medium is the message. He understood that the medium would eventually outweigh the message. He probably couldn’t have imagined how far that would go — back then, TV was the AI and big data of its time. Today, the medium is no longer a channel. It’s an environment. Everything diffuses inside it. Form stops resisting, aligning toward obedience. Even when it shocks, it does so safely, like a recipe. A corn-syrup sweetness that irritates my nerves, right down to my incisors. It feels like our task, at this moment of borderline sensory overdose, is to turn the whole thing upside down — to assign ourselves small, stubborn acts of resistance, self-imposed tasks, observational micro-rituals.
To reclaim patience. I no longer remember what it’s like without technology, to be honest. Technology as an additive extension that gives superpowers on the one hand, and just as much a source of self-sufficiency in other cases. I grew up somewhere between analog and digital, but with a heavy emphasis on digital. I took apart and cleaned dust off a floppy disk and a CD-ROM in my middle school years. Thus, I’d have to ask my father what it was like in those “dark ages,” but when he tells those stories with that nostalgic bravado — even though he’s funny and it’s charming — it kind of kills it for me, so I can’t relate that much. It’s fair to say I don’t really know how it was. In a way, pretty much everyone forgot about cable phones, yet here we are, all drifting around in the same invisible cable-noodle neuronal soup like it’s the Atlantic, more or less conditioned by the same tide.
Same omnipresent, self-referential damn tide. Everything passes through a filter represented by a program, an algorithm, an AI agent as a bodyguard — whatever — a filter that decides usability, what works better and flows easier. It is what it is. There’s nothing conspiratorial here. Corporate greed translated into systemic efficiency isn’t a conspiracy. This is just how we’ve collectively chosen things to be. Nobody forces you, gun to your head, to use social media or even a good old-fashioned classic landing page — it’s just that in the vast majority of cases you can’t really avoid it, either to keep in touch with your loved ones (even as I’m writing this, the Danish national postal service has officially shut down after more than 400 years of activity, no longer delivering letters, only packages), or to sell recycled miscellaneous Andrew Tate cult memorabilia.
Tech is doing its job at reaching distances better than anything analog I’ve ever heard of. So what can you do? McLuhan comically stated that the medium is the “massage.” An association with activating the neuroreceptors responsible for pleasure whenever consuming media. It makes you feel good across almost infinite spectrums of content, and statistically you will come back for more. That’s the whole point. It’s a form of systemic self-sustainability through the self-stimulation of its users. Dead internet theory territory. Less informational, increasingly short-form. It’s been happening since TV, but the format keeps shrinking intentionally, for shorter highs and faster attention-span micro-payments. And this is how we end up with echo chambers and viral shit.
Part II — When the Message Bends the Medium In the same digital space, things end up being treated identically that, under normal circumstances, shouldn’t ever sit at the same table. The same glitch decimates a JPG from a fourth-grader’s summer vacation just as easily as it does a poorly made Hitler portrait. Technically speaking, they are made out of the same building blocks.
The same ASCII characters can be used by a Nobel Peace prize winner in a message about human rights and by a war criminal in a declaration of “special military operation.” From the technical point of view of the medium, the difference between them does not exist. The medium as a technical tool does not judge. Here comes McLuhan’s observation in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964): a violent message and an educational one, transmitted through the same medium, can produce similar structural effects. Reading this, I got scandalized until I realized it is sadly true. Not because they are equal morally, but because the medium imposes the same rhythm, the same duration of attention, the same logic of consumption. Form precedes interpretation.
In China , or rather within the domestic Douyin ecosystem and I want to be corrected if I’m wrong, the regime curates the feed in a very large proportion with educational content, so a young Chinese person can learn a musical instrument in the same way a child from Romania can become radicalized ideologically. In cases like this, the topic of choice becomes gray as hell. The medium models the rhythm in which we read and react, the type of social relationship we build. An IRL argument heard from a distance doesn’t offer nuances.
We don’t know who we side with, at most, the one who screams louder. Same in front of our small screens, except physical distance is replaced with a mechanical distancing of attention, and automatically an emotional one, characterized by scrolling speed. As a rule, if you don’t give curatorial attention to your informational flux, you don’t get much slow or quiet content, but rather something shouting. Information with an exclamation mark. The changes produced by media are invisible at the beginning. McLuhan isn’t the only one who supports this. The idea also appears in: Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman Postman shows that television does not distort truth through lying, but through format. Information equals entertainment, and any message that can’t be quickly assimilated is eliminated.
As he puts it: “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” Walter Ong — orality vs. writing Ong explains the difference between oral cultures and literate ones: orality favors repetition and memorable formula; writing introduces distance through analysis and abstraction. When we return to predominantly oral media (audio-visual, feeds), we don’t regress — we change the structure of thinking. Short form is cognitive infrastructure. Ong’s phrasing is blunt: “By distancing thought… writing raises consciousness.” All converge toward the same conclusion: new mediums are accepted before they are understood. The stages are almost ritualistic: Fascination (novelty): McLuhan describes electricity as sensory shock — early electronic media are perceived like magic. Early television is spectacle.
Normalization (utility): The medium becomes functional. Television enters the daily program. Dependence (integration): Social life restructures. McLuhan observes that television changes family and politics through continuous presence. Invisibility (naturalization): When a medium becomes dominant, it is no longer observed. Exactly when it affects us the most. If my dad cooks listening to a football match on TV, I cook to podcasts and travel vlogs. When we arrive in stage four, the medium is no longer palpable. It’s just another layer of something we’d only notice through absence. When a medium becomes dominant, it becomes invisible. From here comes the contemporary fascination for retro iconic returns: pagers, consoles like Sega Genesis, VHS, audio cassettes. They are visible and, more importantly, palpable.
Shoutout to @TrevElViz he’s doing the Sisyphean work of coagulating culture through Building Atomic Trash Video Rentals: a cult video store for VHS movies that never existed. All of this allows us, archivally, to see the medium as medium, to enjoy what some didn’t live through or what we miss as valid nostalgia. Not calling you old, Trev — much love. From an anthropological perspective, communication is perhaps the most central trait of people and cultures — not only as functional information exchange, but as a structure of social relations and worldviews. When the communication medium changes, it feels like people change too. Exactly when a medium affects us the most, we don’t observe it. Only when another appears do we see the old one in retrospect.
Shoutout to @TrevElViz he’s doing the Sisyphean work of coagulating culture through Building Atomic Trash Video Rentals: a cult video store for VHS movies that never existed. All of this allows us, archivally, to see the medium as medium, to enjoy what some didn’t live through or what we miss as valid nostalgia. Not calling you old, Trev — much love. From an anthropological perspective, communication is perhaps the most central trait of people and cultures — not only as functional information exchange, but as a structure of social relations and worldviews. When the communication medium changes, it feels like people change too. Exactly when a medium affects us the most, we don’t observe it. Only when another appears do we see the old one in retrospect.
Part III — Case Studies: Forcing the Medium to Confess When the message manages to bend the medium. The problem metastasizes when we start to confuse the medium with meaning. Neither asphalt nor a Ferrari 250 GTO doesn’t make Enzo a saint.
There are moments where the message is strong enough to change how the medium itself is perceived, events like the Edward Snowden leaks, which politicized the internet, or the Arab Spring, where social media shifted from entertainment to mobilization tool. Not the platforms changed history, but the messages that forced the platforms to be taken seriously. In these cases, the message didn’t adapt to the medium; it used the medium’s back doors first, then its notoriety, to amplify a medium-bending message.
Here lies the real opportunity: we can’t escape the medium, so change-seekers need to produce messages dense enough to bend this already glitched-out matrix. Art can do this — just not as easily as the written word. Still, in my superficial fascination with system breaches — in this case, the system as a medium of information propagation — I feel the itch to come with solutions, not just problems, or at least with examples where the medium was forced to self-disclose in a deeply satisfying way for those seeking poetic justice.
I’m one of them. And not only self-disclose, but flip upside down, self-dethroning its own naivety in claiming infallibility as supreme instance. In the first case study, that’s exactly what happens. In the second, it’s even juicier. Case Study no. 1 Hans Haacke — Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 . Historical and artistic context (short bio) Hans Haacke (born 1936, Cologne) is a German-born artist who has lived and worked in New York since the 1960s.
In the late 1960s, he shifted from working with natural systems to using social, economic, and political systems as artistic material, becoming a key figure in what later came to be known as institutional critique. At the beginning of the 1970s, the American art scene was undergoing a major transition.
After minimalism and early conceptualism, a number of artists began to question not only the form of the artwork, but also the institutional conditions that allow it to exist: museums, collectors, funding structures, cultural policy.
Haacke came from a different tradition than expressionism or formalism. In the 1960s, his works explored natural systems (water, air, condensation). Around 1969–1970, he made a decisive shift: social, economic, and political systems became the direct subject of his art. Description of the work In the spirit of Haacke, I will render this methodologically, as it should be done: cold data, like the mark of a palm strike across the Guggenheim’s face. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings is a documentary installation produced in 1971 that investigates the real estate activities of Harry Shapolsky, a major New York property owner.
The work is composed of: 142 black-and-white photographs of building façades maps of Manhattan printed texts including company names, ownership structures, acquisition dates, and links between legal entities All information comes from public sources: property registries, tax documents, municipal archives.
Cold, calculated, accounting-like — but with such conceptual finesse that it should be posted as a disclaimer on the door of every institution of higher learning or in every major museum bathroom. The man knew exactly where to hit. And this was the 1970s. You didn’t wash old money’s face that easily back then.
For how long it stayed hidden, I doubt it could ever truly be cleaned — even after the exhibition was canceled and curator Fry got burned. All this poetic justice is sponsored by the absence of subjective artistic form.
If it looks like anything, it looks archival and accounting-heavy, with the smell of laundered money.
But even that isn’t the best part of this act of social engineering. The best part was the director’s reaction.
The director’s argument as a symptom of institutional limits Sources preserve the wording of Messer’s justification. A CAA review notes that Messer considered such works “inappropriate” and described them as an “alien substance” entering the museum’s organism. Come on — you folded without even knowing your hand. Sponsors won’t be thrilled either, Mr. Director.
Haacke was a full-on tsunami. Accounting for his long-term cultural impact, I can honestly say I’m a fan — not aesthetically, not ideologically — but for revolutionary conviction expressed through action and execution, not rhetoric like mine. A certain German rigor in carrying things through to the end, especially while withholding aesthetic flourish you clearly possess, is something dignified. I only recently encountered his work and intend to study it more deeply. Bottom line: it was prophetic — turning Guggenheim New York into something resembling Guggenheim Bilbao, lol.
Case Study no. 2 — Hito Steyerl In Defense of the Poor Image was published in 2009 (e-flux journal #10) and later included in The Wretched of the Screen (2012). It is neither fiction nor manifesto, but a direct analysis of the technical and political conditions under which contemporary digital images circulate.
Steyerl defines the poor image as low-resolution, copied, recompressed, redistributed, unstable, fragmented, and often authorless. Her examples are concrete: torrents, pirated files, ripped clips, copies of copies, images degraded by successive uploads.
She doesn’t mourn quality or authorship; she states they were already partially gone. “The poor image is a copy in motion.” Its value is logistical, not aesthetic. “Its quality is poor, but its accessibility is high.”
Power shifts from object to trajectory. Museums and archives don’t lose power by attack, but by slowness. “The economy of images today is less about originals than about access.” The poor image collapses distinctions — art and document, noise and information — into one compressed file. It is precarious, exploited, and politically functional.
Meaning resides not in fidelity but in survivability. It’s a consequence, nothing heroic — a by-product of a medium that runs too fast to care. Alongside pixels, glitches, dead links, and buffering errors, it becomes the visual grammar of a speed-warped internet. Steyerl doesn’t aestheticize it; she uses the message, camouflaged in the medium, to bend it. The circle closes. The poor image isn’t a victory. It;s a marker of exhaustion.
A symptom of late-stage informational consumerism. Even when iconized or used ironically, it remains an anti-example. In this case, the message — keeping up with the times — bends the medium through velocity alone. Survival demands speed; depth thins out. The poor image functions like an archetypal telegram: stripped, urgent, enough to arrive before the line cuts.