McLuhan Loves You

"The medium is the message" (McLuhan, 25)

Marshall McLuhan was a famous Canadian professor and media theorist, among other things. One of his often quoted lines is "The medium is the message". At first I was befuddled by this. I knew what they meant on their own but together it didn't connect. I knew that a medium was a method of transmitting a message, a "vehicle" for the message. However how the vehicle itself could be what was important and not what it was transporting didn't really make sense. Now it does because of something I heard in class one day.

We were talking about semiotics and moreover the arbitrariness of language. Eventually we stumbled onto the profound idea that the phrase "I love you" doesn't really mean anything at all.

Now obviously this is a rather shocking and inflammatory statement but the argument for it is actually quite interesting.

The conversation was really all about how most words in languages are just assigned seemingly randomly, with no real relation to the object they portray. The idea that they words don't "mean" anything is the idea that an individual's definition of a word is based on their knowledge of it. Which is to say, if a person doesn't speak English they may not know what the word synecdoche means, to them it means nothing.

Our basis for meaning is really just our understanding of what words represent. So then it's really not the words that matter at all is it? The medium is in fact the message.

You see the phrase isn't the important part, if you didn't speak that language you wouldn't know what it meant. What's important is not so much what is said but more how it is said. The inflection and intonation are really more important then what is said. Furthermore, one could say that "the medium is the message" in this case, means that it's not the message "I love you" that is important, it's only yourself, the medium, that really matters.