You should have given more emphasis to the relationship between the medium and the message perhaps by adding how McLuhan observed this for the first time: as he was teaching Literature somewhere in the US, one of his fellow professors had the students stick poems to the columns on the university's building as an attempt to increase appreciation for poetry - and McLuhan noticed that the change of medium changed the way the receiver of the message (the students) interacted with the message itself (the poems) because these were in a different medium (the columns) and this started his life's work. Here's a good quote about it:

“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception.”

Saying McLuhan's ideas were received with skepticism is actually an softening of what a lot of people thought about him: they considered him a hack. However, he's now considered a person ahead of it's time and we could use one of his witty quotes to explain why he was considered a hack in his days:

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

He also predicted advertisement would take over politics because the new electronic medium favored it more than analytical content:

“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”

The points made about interference of social networks and foreign actors both in Brexit and the 2016 US elections are now understood to have been exaggerated. The main problem is the hegemonic position advertisement gained in the political process: it deals with winning elections at any cost but are always - as all advertisement it - lies. In both cases it was the ignored groups in society that being fed up with the lies they were told made a gamble and decided to vote for something different. It was the economic and financial difficulties  these groups were (are) going through that lead to these results and not manipulation of social media¹. The narrative that it was manipulation that lead to those results is an example of the "cold war" McLuhan talks about for they are coordinated messages aimed at keeping things like they and spreading the idea that change is dangerous. The dam will break again and next time it won't be an idiot like Trump that it will elect.

1) In many other countries this was attempted by Cambridge Analytica and it did not work. What helped Brexit to win was actually the realization - using information acquired through social media - that there were around 3 million voters in the UK that, though disenfranchised, did not vote and this were the voters that gave Brexit the win. In the US, the discontentment was much more visible with its records in middle age family men suicides and record opioid overdoses in middle class industrial towns.

Very helpful! I'm currently learning this in college so thank your for making it easier for me to understand

Our teachers could not explain this complex problem so well
then you did !!

Using this in Advanced Media I teach tomorrow. Thank you for sharing, you have a new follower.

A very useful resource, particularly as my Y10 Media students are currently in the midst of studying news. I'm going to use this with them today as Mcluhan often becomes reduced to a single quote in modern media courses when his work represents so much more.

Thank you for this wonderful video. Now i need to make a report about it :)

His words make a lot more sense to me now than they did then.

I hope kids formally studying media does a lot more than see this video. I've been out of school for decades now and I find works like his extremely relevant to our times. Also recommended is Neil Postman's work.

Hi guys,

Marshall McLuhan was an eccentric visionary but many of his ideas were difficult to understand. His 1967 book "The Medium is the Massage" changed all that and articulates his revolutionary ideas in a clear and concise manner. This review explores some McLuhan's quotes from the book and shows how prophetic they have turned out to be, forty years on.

Cheers

your channel is fire dawg!

Nerdwriter also has a pretty great vid on this same topic!

Hi, can you please tell from where the last lines of paragraph is from I mean which book it would be really helpful if you could tell me that I need for referencing for my university essay. Thank you

Consciousness is a fundamental process! In the case of A.I. And its emergent properties, the medium is the message! Ethics in A.I. And every heart! Unity under the Tree of Life! ❤️🙏🏻✌🏻

im pretty sure i watched a video on vice that literally was almost word for word the same as this guys video...

Love this

Yes very good thank you

1:31  think I saw that in a show

Thanks for pointing that out, I'm dyslexic so I have no idea if I made a mistake or the authors made a mistake, happily it was the authors this time.

I've been trying to learn this topic by reading articles in my mother language which were very complicated. But now I am easily well-informed although I'm not a native in English thanks to this video

That's funny I was reading a comment a couple minutes ago by somebody who didn't think any of the late night TV shows are THE MEDIA .... he thought they were different from the news and social media.

     I had to explain to him that anything on TV is considered Media .