Text messaging, due to its convenience, sends information low in content much more often. Letter-writing, because of it’s slow nature, tended to have much more content within the letter. But with the development of new technology, the speed at which the networks operate changes dramatically.

Relaying information through words is not new.

Then, text messaging came into play more recently where people can instantly communicate and be notified of a communication immediately through sound. The computer made communication and information travel accelerate though the use of email to relay information from one party to another. For instance, letter-writing was once a common form of communication that could relay information from one party to another. If we look at three types of information networks like McLuhan’s examples, we can see similar results. As a result, the airplane’s network of transportation becomes much larger than that of the train’s network. However, the airplane, relying on air for travel, allows the plane to go theoretically anywhere. If we were to look at the transportation network based on the railroad system, the train can only got to where there are tracks. This development of new technology resulting in the dissolving of another greatly impacts networks. With the invention of the airplane, though, the railroad has become somewhat dissolved as a medium, thus dissolving the politics and associations of the city. This in turn led to a society whose government and politics were based around a railroad system. The railroad did not bring about new ideas in transportation such as the wheel, but it did accelerate the way of transportation. In this case, McLuhan uses the example of the railway system. Thus, technology is an extension of the human, as McLuhan emphasizes, and technology is the medium (and the message).Īs an extension of man, though, the machine, according to McLuhan, is fragmentary and superficial in its pattern of human relationships.

However, if we think of humans as information systems instead of organisms, the lightbulb becomes a method of moving information just as IBM did not make office equipment but information processors. The lightbulb, if considered to be an extension of man, would possibly considered an extension of the eye. In his first chapter, McLuhan mentions the idea of the lightbulb as an example of a medium that shapes the actions and associations among humans. Philosopher and public intellectual Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” back in 1967 in his media theory book titled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The Machine as the Fragmentary Extension of the Self

Media as extensions of man