A paperback unlike most others
In 1967 a slim paperback with the title The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects appeared from Bantam Books. Its credits read “Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore”, with Jerome Agel named as coordinator. It sold in large numbers for a book of its kind and made McLuhan, already known in academic circles, a name familiar to ordinary readers and television viewers.
McLuhan was a Canadian literary scholar who taught at the University of Toronto. He had become well known through two earlier books: The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, on how print changed human thought, and Understanding Media in 1964, which contained the phrase “the medium is the message”. The 1967 volume was meant as a more accessible, more visual summary of his arguments, and it was designed by Fiore, a graphic designer and editor, as much as it was written.
The famous typo
The title is a well-known pun. Accounts of its origin generally say that the printer’s proof contained a mistake, with “massage” in place of “message”. McLuhan, on seeing it, liked the result and chose to keep it. The reported explanation fits his taste for wordplay, but the details of the story are hard to confirm and vary between tellings. The book itself offers several readings of the title: that a medium works on its users, that it “massages” them, that it shapes their senses, and that it involves a mass audience.
Whatever the truth, the effect was to turn a slogan into a joke and then a brand. The title was repeated in advertising, in conversation and in magazines for years afterwards. A spoken-word record based on the book followed in 1968.
The argument in brief
McLuhan’s central claim is that the form of a communications technology matters more to society than the specific content it carries. A new medium, whether the printed book, the telephone or television, changes the scale of human affairs, the speed of events and the balance among the senses. People who focus only on what is being said, he argued, miss the deeper change in how they are living.
Three ideas recur in the book and in his wider writing.
- Technologies are extensions of the human body and senses. A wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, and electronic media extend the central nervous system.
- The printed word encouraged linear, individualistic habits of thought, while electronic media push toward immediacy and involvement. McLuhan associated this with a new, more collective kind of awareness.
- The world has contracted into what he called a global village. The phrase dates from his earlier work, and it seemed especially apt in the summer of 1967, when a live satellite programme linked broadcasters in many countries, as in the Our World broadcast.
He also divided media into “hot” and “cool”, based on how much information they supply and how much work the audience must do to fill in the gaps. This distinction was popular but is widely regarded as vague, and critics have long found his reasoning more suggestive than rigorous.
The visual design
The book’s look is as important as its text. Pages mix photographs, drawings and bold typography, and text is sometimes set sideways, upside down or in mirror image, so the reader must work to read it. Some pages are filled with a single line; others place images beside short quotations from McLuhan’s earlier writing. The pace is closer to a magazine layout or a film than to a conventional argument, and the intention is that the form itself demonstrates the thesis. A book about the effects of media becomes a book that uses media effects.
The approach drew on the visual culture of the mid-1960s, which was awash with posters, album covers and television imagery. It fits with the bold graphics of psychedelic rock posters and the experimental layouts of the underground press, though McLuhan was no counterculture figure himself.
Why it caught on in 1967
The timing was ideal. Colour broadcasting was spreading, as the spread of colour television in American homes shows, and television was increasingly seen as a force that shaped politics and daily life. The Vietnam War was being called the first “living-room war”, which gave McLuhan’s emphasis on the medium a concrete example. Audiences in Canada were also at the height of national attention, with Expo 67 in Montreal presenting many of its exhibitions through film, multiple screens and other new media.
McLuhan was also unusually willing to speak to the public, and he appeared in magazines and on television. He was taken up by parts of the American counterculture as a kind of prophet, although he held fairly conservative personal views and was ambivalent about some of the changes he described.
Assessments since
Scholars remain divided. Some criticise him for sweeping generalisations, a lack of evidence and an oracular style. Others see him as one of the first to treat media as an environment, and note that later debates about the internet and social platforms often echo his questions. Whichever view is taken, the 1967 book remains a distinctive product of its moment: a short, loud, playful argument that the way we communicate changes who we are.