The Medium is the Message

I had trouble really wrapping my mind around McLuhan's message. However, I feel as though the difficulty that I experienced only helped to prove McLuhan's point. So often, we miss what is simple and real in our search for minutia. I found McLuhan's example of the light bulb as pure information to be incredibly helpful while reading the text. A message does not have to be visual or vocal to exist. The object that convey's a message (lightbulb, tv, etc.), the messanger, is media. The tool makes it's own statement. This statement being the tool's impact on society. McLuhan makes this evident when he writes, "What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." Here, McLuhan makes his point clearest. He gives his notion, "medium is the message," a practical application.