Is this a whoosh or did you not make it to post #2?
Post #2 may not be the whole story, the more complete truth perhaps illuminating the gray area between intent and accident:
According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, “by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue – the subtitle is ‘An Inventory of Effects,’ underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.” (Gordon, p. 175.)
However, the FAQ section on the website maintained by McLuhan’s estate says that this interpretation is incomplete and makes its own leap of logic as to why McLuhan left it as is:
“Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover ‘Massage’ as it still does. The title was supposed to have read The Medium is the Message but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’ Thus, there are now four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.”
Probably not more than a handful of people today know the difference between Understanding Media, a dense 350-page history of technology demanding rereading, and The Medium is the Massage, a slim 100-page paperback that is mostly pictures, with a few paragraphs of semi-profound text. Of course a pun is the proper name for it, even if the pun were accidental. It’s a book that ends with a New Yorker cartoon of a son (complete with guitar) earnestly explaining McLuhan to his dazed father holding a book in his floor-to-ceiling library.
How many things sound even better 50 years after they were printed?
Ignore The Medium is the Massage. Read his earlier work when he still had something to say.
Why would I need to read his books? I’m already very well familiar with the medium of books, so there isn’t anything new for me in them.
Unless, of course, it’s possible that his message in the books was something other than the medium.
Cute. But in a really, really dumb way.
Spam by neelam reported.
Hey, it makes more sense than the gobbledygook in that cartoon caption.
Hey, it makes more sense than the gobbledygook in that cartoon caption.