The Book Medium Is a Stronger Message Than Its Content Marshall McLuhan

When I was teaching at Columbia University, techno-prophet Marshall McLuhan came down from Toronto to lecture there.

He talked about how the linear pattern of information resulting from print technology limited the thought patterns of people who learned from printed books.

Word follows word, line follows line, paragraph follows paragraph, page follows page, chapter follows chapter, in a single necessary order from the first page to the last.

Learning through a medium that is a one-way street prevented creative, flexible, associative, open-ended, multi-directional and multi-dimensional thought.

Instead of just being authoritative, books became authoritarian, demanding thinking in straight lines from a fixed point of view.

The book medium became a stronger message than its content.

Designed to be read in privacy, in seclusion from others, the book ended dialogue.

It conferred the values of isolation, detachment, passivity, and non-involvement.

Credit: Mel Alexenberg reporting the words of Marshall McLuhan