“Medium is the message” McLuhan’s summary of the status and role of the media in the development of human society. McLuhan elaborated on the role of the media from a social perspective: that is, in the long run, the truly meaningful message is not the content that the media of each era prompts people, but the media itself. The content delivered by the media of each era is generated according to the communication tools of each era.
McLuhan believes that the media is an “extension of human”, The media allows people to cross the gap between time and space, and the medium is an extension of human beings. Broadcasting allows us to hear farther, newspapers let us see farther, and television is all-round that allows us to maximize our perceptions at multiple levels of audiovisual. and this extension of the media, in turn, shapes and controls the scale and form of human relations and human actions.
The technological progress does not necessarily cause hazards in its current age, in fact, it pushes the society forward, For society, the medium is the fundamental driving force for social development or the symbol that distinguishes different social forms. McLuhan divided human civilization into three stages: the era of oral communication, the era of print communication, and the era of electronic communication. The characteristics of the times of each era are determined by the media. McLuhan made the Franch Revolution as an example, The background of the French Revolution, in addition to the historical factors we know, There are media forms change factors, That is, the transition period from the oral to printing, The saturated publication helped France achieved national identity. Therefore, new technology or medium plays a crucial part in society.
The emergence of new media in each era has had a great impact on the emergence of relevant information and media organizations, and changes in human thinking. Many new media people have emerged as the times have come, to get rid of the traditional working model, escaped from 9-5 jobs, creating their own identity through the Internet, creating their own platform to publish their knowledge and network teaching. These are the new channels that the Internet has brought us. What we can do is to grasp every opportunity to achieve ourselves, find every vent, and ride the wind and waves.
