Marshall McLuhan was the kind of sorcerer who turned media theory into performance art. Dressed as a philosopher but speaking with the wit of a stand-up comedian, he could make ideas feel like punchiness. When his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man appeared in 1964, academia was both dazzled and disturbed. In it, McLuhan made a declaration so audacious that it still echoes across every glowing screen: “The medium is the message.” What you say, he argued, matters less than how you say it because the medium itself shapes thought, culture, and society. Every channel of communication is not just a carrier of meaning but a maker of meaning.
In 1967, McLuhan teamed up with designer Quentin Fiore to create something even bolder: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. The title contained a typo: “Massage” instead of “Message.” The publisher panicked, but McLuhan laughed. “It’s not an error,” he said, “it’s the truth- media really massage the human sensorium.” That “mistake” became prophetic. The medium, he insisted, doesn’t just deliver messages; it kneads, molds, and reshapes our senses, emotions, and consciousness.
Understanding Media was a work of philosophy, exploring how every technology extends the human body. The wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, and electronic media extend the nervous system itself. He wrote, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” A light bulb, he pointed out, conveys no message but transforms the night, changing how we live, work, and perceive time. Media, then, are not mere vehicles of content; they are engines of reality itself.
The Medium is the Massage, by contrast, was a designed experience- part book, part sensory collage. With its interplay of text, image, and white space, it was less something to read than to feel. “All media work us over completely,” McLuhan wrote. The line rings truer than ever: our constant scrolling, tapping, and reacting are extensions of that “massage.” We imagine that we use media, when in fact, media use us; stroking our senses while silently shaping our attention, emotion, and belief.
The two books differ in tone but share the same heartbeat. Understanding Media, written at the dawn of television, is cerebral and analytical while The Medium is the Massage, transforming media theory into an aesthetic experience, is visual and playful. One builds the framework; the other makes you feel it.
Today, the “chat box” and the “feed” are not just spaces for communication but the new temples of faith, ritual, and ideology. As McLuhan foresaw, “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” That global village is now the social network, where each user is a tiny high priest of their own belief system, spreading new creeds through likes, shares, and outrage.
McLuhan’s two books are, in essence, dramatisations of the same revelation. Understanding Media illuminated the mind; The Medium is the Massage illuminated the skin. His “mistake” remains one of intellectual history’s most brilliant jokes because it turned out to be true. The medium isn’t merely the message; it is also the masseur, the therapist, the invisible hand that molds our mental and emotional life.
To sum up, Understanding Media tells us that the medium shapes society; The Medium is the Massage reminds us that the medium shapes experience. Together, they form one enduring truth the medium is the message, and the message is the massage. As long as we’re typing into chat-boxes while algorithms caress our emotions, McLuhan remains the most relevant ghost in our digital machine.
Although the first enjoyable Bengali article I read on McLuhan was published in Dhaka Bishwabidyaloy Potrika in October 1984, written by Professor Ali Riaz, where he brilliantly unveiled the phenomenal mysteries of McLuhan’s theory. After many years, I finally found another Bengali piece that interprets McLuhan. A young intellectual, poet, media and gender researcher Professor Afroja Shoma has done something truly remarkable in her recent book Understanding McLuhan: Gonomaddhom, Noyamaddhom O Shomaj. She has brought Marshall McLuhan right to the heart of the Bengali sphere. According to her, the intricate web of electronic devices, the internet, and algorithms has created a new monster of our time- Surveillance Capitalism of constant observation and data control. McLuhan’s timeless warnings ring truer than ever, for technology and algorithms are quietly sketching the maps of our thoughts, relationships, and structures of power.
In Shoma’s reading, McLuhan is not merely a communication theorist but a cultural visionary, a thinker who traced the evolution of human experience from church to chat-box. Her book presents the interplay of gender, technology, and capital as a kind of intricate dance, where human data itself has become the “fuel” of modern capitalism. Yet even amid her serious analysis, Shoma never loses her sense of humor. She writes that if McLuhan were alive today, he might quip: “Human civilisation has journeyed from sitting face-to-face with Bonolota Sen to sitting interface-to-interface on Facebook and Insta!”
To Shoma, McLuhan was the true prophet of the internet, who foresaw the coming of the “electric age,” when the whole world would shrink into a single global village. That prophecy has now materialised. With every new technological invention, the media ecology has transformed- traditional television, radio, and newspapers now gasp for relevance like old dinosaurs. Afroja Shoma ends on a note of gentle irony: escaping this “digital cage,” she warns, may not just be difficult but nearly impossible. Which is why, she insists, it is high time we read McLuhan again; for as long as we keep scrolling, his insights will remain the truest mirror of our digital lives.
