The Medium Is Changing Us: Marshall McLuhan and the Age of Social Media

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was published in 1964, long before Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, smartphones or the internet as we know it. Yet reading McLuhan today can feel strangely like reading a book written specifically for the social-media age.

His most famous phrase is also his most important: “the medium is the message.”

McLuhan wasn’t simply saying that the technology we use to communicate matters. He was saying something much more profound: the medium itself changes us. We tend to concentrate on the content being delivered through a medium while overlooking what the medium is doing to our habits, our relationships, our attention and even our understanding of ourselves.

That may be one of the most important ideas we need to recover in the age of social media.

We Think We Are Using Social Media. But Social Media Is Also Using Us.

When we open Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube, we generally think about what we are doing: watching a video, posting a picture, reading an article, commenting on someone’s opinion or keeping up with friends.

McLuhan would encourage us to ask a different question: What is this medium training me to become?

That is a much more unsettling question.

A newspaper encourages a different kind of attention than television. Television encourages something different from a book. A telephone creates different possibilities for relationships than a letter.

And social media creates an environment unlike anything that preceded it.

It is immediate, continuous, visual, interactive and measurable. And, perhaps most importantly, it places the individual at the center of the communication system.

That last characteristic deserves our attention.

McLuhan’s Insight About Narcissism

One of the most fascinating parts of Understanding Media is McLuhan’s discussion of narcissism.

He uses the story of Narcissus not simply as a warning about vanity, but as a metaphor for what happens when we become extensions of ourselves through technology.

Narcissus didn’t simply fall in love with his reflection because he thought he was beautiful. McLuhan’s interpretation is more complicated. Narcissus became numb to the fact that the image he was looking at was actually an extension of himself.

And that is where McLuhan becomes remarkably relevant to social media.

Our social-media profiles are, in a very real sense, extensions of ourselves.

We don’t simply communicate through them. We construct versions of ourselves through them.

We select the photograph, choose the words, and decide what experiences to display. Then we edit, enhance and delete. And lastly we count likes, followers and watch the numbers.

We begin to see ourselves through the reflection being returned to us by the medium.

The danger isn’t merely that people become vain.

The deeper danger is that we can become absorbed in our mediated selves without realizing what the medium is doing to us.

The Smartphone Has Turned the Mirror Into a Social Environment

An old-fashioned mirror showed us ourselves.

Social media does something much more powerful. It shows us ourselves and then tells us what other people think about the image we have created.

The heart, the like, the comment, the share and the follower become a kind of social feedback mechanism.

The mirror now talks back. Like in the movie Snow White where the the magic mirror belongs to the Evil Queen, who constantly asks it: who is the fairest in the land? And because the feedback from this modern mirror is measurable, we can become preoccupied with improving the reflection.

This helps explain why social media can encourage a peculiar form of narcissism even among people who would never describe themselves as narcissistic.

You don’t have to think, “I am wonderful.”

You simply have to become increasingly concerned with: How am I being seen?

What should I post? How many people saw it? Did they like it? Why didn’t they like it? Should I post again? What version of myself gets the greatest response?

The medium gradually turns communication into self-presentation.

What Do Our Communication Tools Do to Us?

This is perhaps McLuhan’s greatest contribution to the conversation. Every medium solves certain problems. But every medium also creates new habits.

The automobile gave us mobility but also created suburbs, highways, traffic and enormous changes in how communities were designed.

Television gave us access to an enormous amount of information and entertainment but also changed the way families spent their evenings.

The telephone made distance less important but also made constant accessibility possible.

And social media has made it possible to communicate with thousands or millions of people instantly.

But what has that convenience required of us?

It has encouraged us to become constantly available. It has shortened our attention, and made immediate reaction more valuable. It has blurred the distinction between private and public life. It has turned ordinary experiences into potential content. It has made popularity measurable. And it has encouraged us to communicate with audiences rather than neighbors.

Perhaps most significantly, it can substitute connection with the appearance of connection.

That distinction matters enormously.

We Have More Connections, and Less Neighboring

This is where McLuhan’s ideas intersect with one of the great social questions of our time.

I can have 2,000 Facebook friends and still not know the person who lives three houses away.

I can follow hundreds of people on Instagram and never sit on my front porch and talk with my neighbor.

I can watch videos about loneliness, community and belonging without actually knowing the people in my own community.

I can express concern about society online while remaining largely disconnected from the people physically surrounding me.

Social media can give us the feeling of participation without requiring the obligations of participation.

Real community is different.

A neighbor isn’t an audience, they are a person.

A neighbor may need a ride or a lawn mowed.

A neighbor may knock on your door when something goes wrong.

A neighbor may disagree with you politically.

A neighbor may be inconvenient.

And that’s precisely why neighboring matters.

Relationships require something social media doesn’t always require: presence.

The Problem Isn’t Technology. It’s What Technology Makes Normal.

This is where I think McLuhan’s argument is especially valuable. The question isn’t whether social media is “good” or “bad.”

That’s too simple.

The better question is: What behaviors does this medium make normal?

Social media makes it normal to broadcast. It makes it normal to comment without knowing someone, to consume hundreds of opinions before breakfast, to document experiences rather than simply experience them.

It makes it normal to maintain relationships digitally rather than physically, to respond immediately, and to build an identity around what other people can see.

None of these things is necessarily evil.

But taken together, they create a culture. And cultures shape people.

The Medium Changes the Message and the Messenger

Perhaps this is the most important lesson of Understanding Media for our moment.

We have spent enormous amounts of time asking what people are saying on social media.

McLuhan tells us to spend some time asking what social media is making us become.

Are we becoming better listeners, or better neighbors? Are we becoming more patient, or more capable of sustained attention?

Are we becoming more willing to serve people who cannot increase our follower count?

Are we developing deeper relationships, or are we becoming increasingly concerned with our own reflection?

That is the McLuhan question. And it is one we desperately need to ask.

The answer may not be found in deleting our social-media accounts. It may be found in recognizing that every medium carries a price along with its benefits.

The question is whether we understand the price.

McLuhan died in 1980, before the smartphone transformed daily life and before the internet became the dominant communications environment.

But he gave us a remarkably useful warning: Don’t just pay attention to what the technology delivers. Pay attention to what the technology does to you.

That may be the most important media-literacy lesson of the twenty-first century.

And perhaps the antidote to an increasingly mediated life is surprisingly old-fashioned:

Put down the phone. Join something. Show up. Know your neighbors. Attend the meeting. Host the gathering. Help somebody. Build a reputation through what you actually do.

And remember that a real human being standing on your front porch is not merely another connection. They’re your neighbor.

WRITTEN BY

David L. Burton

For more information, visit the Engaged Neighbor website. Take our pledge and become part of a movement! Or subscribe to our newsletter. Access some of the research documents written by David Burton, the author of this blog. Or better yet, purchase one of his books off Amazon. Contact David L. Burton via email at dburton541@yahoo.