McLuhan

McLuhan McLuhan was a master of aphorisms, and like Heidegger, he loved wordplay. The title of his best-selling book The Medium is the Massage is no exception. Maybe he was making a statement about the way that the media massage or pummel us, or perhaps he was making a pun on the new "mass-age." In any case the underlying notion is that the message is greatly impacted by the delivery system. Some would understand this position to be the ultimate in media determinism. If the content is obliterated by the channel, "what" we say is of little importance-only "how" we chose to deliver it. McLuhan's belief in technological determinism is obvious by his phrase, "we shape our tools and they in turn shape us" (quoted in Griffin, 1991, p. 294).