To be completely honest, “The Medium is the Massage” was presented in a completely bizarre format that made it incredibly difficult to focus on and take seriously. The abstract pairing of pictures, words, and sound all together perhaps contributed the most to the confusion that McLuhan is trying to create, I suppose. He’s trying to distance himself from the idea of completing today’s jobs with the technology of ‘yesterday’. He wants to use the technology that he has – in a completely new way for us, but a completely normal way for him – to convey his ideas. It is certainly a step-back from the “linear, or sequential, thought” that the invention of text supposedly created.

In a way, the entire text serves as its own “massage”. The text itself is the environment that McLuhan believes we create ourselves, and he alters it in multiple ways the way that the media all the time. Much like the extension of our feet is cars, and clothes an extension of our skin, and electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system, he extends his own ideas in multiple combined mediums that all affect our personal selves, through our extensions. The mix of images itself conveys a completely mixed message that overall become McLuhan’s major idea, but when put side by side with no context, make absolutely no sense. For example, the mixture of political cartoons, and surrealist photographs that are sprinkled commonly throughout the pages. And let’s not forget the repetitive patterns and backwards text. The only way these images can really be seen together in a cohesive structure is through the small packets of text that string these pictures along and make them somewhat coherent to the overall idea.

The idea of the environment-forming was definitely thought-provoking. The fact that electric communities have a far greater influence these days than our parents is definitely something that’s the case these days, and the school system is suffering for it. Not to mention actual familial relationships. All of this online interaction is creating what McLuhan calls “the global village”. Where literacy once separated us, technology brings us together, where nothing is private, and everything is a google search away. With this new environment, the idea of imposing old technology simply doesn’t communicate anymore. Humor itself is an example of the new methods of communication that we as a society prefer. The role that government and education also has some influence, where one instills certain values that citizens have to live up to, and the other is busy using outdated forms of communication for its students who are frustrated with the lack of reconciliation between old and new technologies, respectively. All of these factors combine to create an environment where many people struggle with this reconciliation, and the media is there to massage, or perhaps exacerbate, the effects.

Perhaps if we focused on using this new technology somehow to combine both old and new technologies to influence our personal environment so that we can “gain perspective” that was taught to us through the making of text. Since people no longer felt included in the conceptual discussion of the text, they were suddenly allowed to keep opinions to themselves, which felt itself in the divide that readers and writers still tend to have today. However, having a “global village” may certainly change that, and may challenge the users of technology today to gain perspective in other ways, or perhaps mingle into one single mindset, like a gigantic media-fed gelatinous mob.