#53- The Medium is the Massage

The medium is the… massage?

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan teamed up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore to write The Medium is the Massage, a short 160-page picture book that offers us a glimpse as to how the medium "shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action,” of work and leisure.

Karl points out, “to say the media is the massage means the medium, this conceptional world, is massaging you— it’s rhetoric."

Have societies always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which we communicate or by the content of the communication?

This nonconventional book is a nice companion piece to Bernays’ Propaganda and part of our “Modern Sophists” podcast series.

Tune in to this week’s episode and discover how media can touch our character formation, our public and private lives, even our sentimentality versus hard-head clarity.