Human beings create things with an end goal in mind, but that creation doesn’t just fulfill that goal; it goes beyond it. When we create something, we do it to appease one problem, but that creation then becomes a medium itself for other things. Marshall McLuhan uses the example of the creation of the railway to explain this. He states, “The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure”. Media extends human beings because the creation of one thing becomes the solution to other problems, or it creates new ways to do things. Just like the railway; a network of tracks, also brought about the innovation of cities and new jobs. As we advance and create these mediums, they become extensions for us and extend our society.  There is only one problem with these extensions, and that’s that they bring in the loss of jobs for individuals. The reason for this is automation, which is the use of machines to do human processes. These machines are human creations, medias.
Being that the medium is the message, artists and designers can hold a lot of power in creating new ideas but have no power over the message that that idea will send out. “Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message” (1). McLuhan uses this line to explain that that it is not the designer’s creation that sent a message, but what people used that creation for. The creation of electric light is a very good example of this. “Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the “content” of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (2). Light was created just for the purpose of seeing better, but from it came things that couldn’t exist without it, and that wasn’t something the creator of electric light came up with it, that’s just how the people used it.
It’s very simple to explain why the work of a designer is subordinate to the media they use to create and distribute information. After a designer creates something, that thing takes control of itself. It’s not up to the designer what it can do or what it can be used for. It is no longer up to him what society will decide to use to for and what else it can make out of it. The extensions that come from that designer’s creation is no longer in their hand, that is why the designer is subordinate to their own creation. Better said by McLuhan, “In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out corn- flakes or Cadillacs” (1). The machine alters humans, humans do not alter the machine.
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