Deep within The Medium is the Massage, near the bottom of an illustrated page sits the simple quote “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” This metaphor for how we, as humans, build upon our pasts was written by Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist and social critic. The world has changed drastically from Marshall McLuhan’s Swinging Sixties to now, the early Twenty Twenties with a worldwide pandemic. As we reflect on our connection with technology in a world of fast technological changes it may seem hard to embrace the change. However, through Marshall McLuhan's theory of categorizing media, we can understand our relationship as humans with technology, how it affects us, and what may lie in our future. So, let's go on, “march[ing] backwards to the future”.

Before we can further dive into McLuhan’s media theory we must first define what he means by “Media”. At the beginning of his book, Understanding Media, McLuhan explains media as “any extension of ourselves”. Technologies are media or mediums which become extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of humans. Thus, “The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye...electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.” In this simple statement we find the core of McLuhan’s media theory: “The whole of society, so to speak is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle.” Looking even further through our rear-view mirror, to the beginning of the human race, we only had our senses and ourselves; eye for sight, ear for sound, mouth for voice, and just our feet to get around. As the early humans continued to evolve socially and humanity got more complicated, there was a need to be more effective with our interactions between ourselves and the world. This need manifested into the creation of tools; or as McLuhan defines media, extending our limitations. All of a sudden, life - and what it meant to be human - changed.

One of the first major changes came with the introduction of language. An extension of our thoughts and voice, normally kept private, now allowed to be shared and communicated. Language allows us to extend our inner selves briefly into our surroundings. We can express our ideas, communicate disagreement or endorsement, formulate plans, and collaborate with others nearby. Language greatly aided the survival of early humans by allowing them to express the state of their body, whether they were wounded, hungry, or in danger, and in turn understand and query the states of others. Language also helped convey knowledge, extending not only our current state but our past experiences out of our head and into our community. This new ability to collaborate helped us pass knowledge on how to extend not only our inner selves but also our outer bodies. What we traditionally know as “tools” were developed to extend the rest of our selves; hand axes, essentially sharpened stones, to extend our hands; clothes to extend our skin; shoes to extend our feet; spears and sticks to extend our arms. Later on in humanity’s growth our more complicated senses caught up with telescopes extending our sight and instruments further extending our voice.

“Nothing follows from following, except change”. McLuhan states this in reference to another principal of his media organisation system; newer media can extend previous media instead of always extending a part of us. “This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” As humanity progressed our tools became more complicated, extending one another. As the content of film is the photograph, so too is the content of an axe the hand axe. This can continue in a chain, the content of a book is the written word, the content of the written word is the spoken word, and the spoken word is the extension of our inner thoughts and ideas. Every media has this chain of content leading to an extension of a part of us. Following it, we can conclude that axes are our hands and books are our thoughts.

The written word was the next big shift in humanity after the spoken word. It may seem trivial to state, but the impact of the written word shifted how we interact with the world once again. Instead of briefly expressing our ideas we could start etching them permanently into our surroundings. Humanity shifted from remembering to writing, allowing parts of ourselves to persist past our death and allowing us to use information from before our age. As humanity continued progressing and more mediums extended the written word, such as paper or books, we got more efficient at expressing and persisting ourselves for future generations. The result of this is that our communities, our villages, became larger and more interconnected. Villages were able to store and share more information than just what their members could remember by using books, libraries, and records. Even before The Medium is the Massage McLuhan saw the increasing size and complexity of communities and in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man predicted the phenomenon of the “Global Village”, where any media could be consumed by a global audience around the world. This was way before the internet, which was only invented in 1989.

Returning from the past back to our backwards march into the future, we can see that media continues to follow this trend. Analysing what media builds on what other media and following the chain back to the part of ourselves it extends can shed light on how media affects us and how we are affected by it. Just as the concept of the written word fundamentally shifted how humanity interacted with the world, all mediums shape us. The modern internet is an extension to our libraries, continuing the chain of books and the written word back to our core ideas and thoughts, further shaping our interactions. Marshall McLuhan believed that the media itself is more important or impactful than the actual content delivered in it. This is important to remember in our world of ever-changing technology. A solid foundation like Marshall McLuhan’s theory helps us think critically about our relationship with technology, what may lie in the future, and how it shapes us. Truly, as Marshall McLuhan states, “The medium is the message.”