Marshall McLuhan's message - the media is you

While we might all remember his famous quote 'the media is the message' and his comments about the world becoming a global village, it was his thinking on how the media were becoming extensions of our senses that makes him relevant today.

When we walk down the street with earplugs in our ears and Bluetooth receivers wrapped around our heads who can say where the human body ends and what McLuhan called its 'extensions' begin? In some ways, we are the media. We are creators and interpreters of our own media worlds.

When we compulsively check incoming Twitter feeds or Facebook 'likes', are the media just providers of information or, in fact, re-organizing our nervous systems? as McLuhan suggested.

McLuhan made some fairly unsound statements, especially in the latter half of his career. There is no evidence that one of the effects of mass media is a 'reorganisation' our nervous systems. "We shape our tools and they in turn shape us," he once said. But how?

The most significant aspect of McLuhan's legacy was his willingness to explore what were then new areas of study. The notion that a professor of English literature was interested in popular culture - in advertising, movies and television, in how computers worked - shifted peoples' ideas of what needed to be taken seriously if you were going to try to understand the contemporary world.