Joyce turned this into “urban and orbal” in one place in the Wake, and into “the urb, it orbs” in another. In it he uses two phrases, both allude to the Pope’s annual Easter message to the City (of Rome) and the World: Urbi et Orbi. Wyndham Lewis’s America and Cosmic Man-if it comes from anywhere. As far as I have been able to ascertain, it comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or else from P. He did not get it from Teilhard, however. it has been variously attributed, to Teilhard de Chardin, for example. 9) On the source of the phrase, “Global Village”Īs to the origin of the term “global village” in McLuhan’s work. “The medium is the message” because it is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” ( Understanding Media, NY, 1964, p. What McLuhan writes about the railroad applies with equal validity to the media of print, television, computers and now the internet. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium.

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. The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses On “The Medium is the Message”Įach medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message. The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.” On media and technologies as Extensions of Man (the subtitle of Understanding Media)

When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!”

The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. Eric McLuhan, Marshall’'s eldest son Why is the title of the book “The medium is the massage” and not “The medium is the message”?Īctually, the title was a mistake.

Understanding mcluhan