McLuhan’s Massage

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher working in the field of media studies in the 20th century. His most well known theory is the concept of the medium is the message, where the medium is a form of communication that has more importance in conveying the message than the content it carries. In this sense, the message is perceived differently according to the medium that is used to communicate it, for example how a message spoken by a person has a different impact than the same message written down in a newspaper or blog post for digital media. This concept was first introduced by McLuhan in his 1964 publication Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. However, in 1967 McLuhan published another book in collaboration with Quentin Flore, with the following title:

what?????????

The Medium is the Massage is one of the most mysterious and mind-boggling titles I have ever seen. Who changed MESSAGE to MASSAGE and most importantly why?? In the Commonly Asked Questions section on the official Marshall McLuhan website (which really exists), the mysterious title is explained as follows:

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 Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!”

The section continues to explain there are four different ways to read the last word of the title:

Message
Mess Age
Massage
Mass Age

If this does not seem complicated enough, there is an alternative explanation of the title, as provided by biographer W. Terrence Gordon:

By the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan recognized his saying was 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.

So now we have two possible explanations, one claiming that the title was a typing error, which McLuhan found very funny and kept, or a deliberate choice to depart from his now cliché sentence by using a layered pun. I think the title is incredibly effective, and it does not matter whether or not it was intended by McLuhan. The title immediately demonstrates that a medium is never neutral, it has the power to influence how people perceive the content or message it is trying to convey. In this case, the content (/message) of the book title was supposed to be ”message”, but because of the subtle change of a single letter, a change in the medium of printing, the content has shifted to something new: massage. This could be a play on words, such as the official Marshall McLuhan website proposes, referring to a Mass Age, where our society is becoming more and more dependent on mass production, digitization and the extension of our human senses in the form of different media. But also the literal concept of massaging can refer to the medium influencing us, ‘massaging’ us by changing our senses and perception, sometimes without us even realizing.

The book itself also showcases how the medium influences the content, by presenting the text in a strong visual sense with a focus on the graphic design, using big images, visuals and different lettering types. McLuhan collaborated with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, who interpreted McLuhan’s text and created all the layout and page arrangement. Fiore himself said that the book ”had to convey the spirit, the populist outcry of the time, in an appropriate form. The “linearity” of the average book wouldn’t work. The medium, after all, was the message!’” In conclusion, with this whole book being about the medium changing the content while being very aware of how the text and visuals are presented, the strange title suddenly begins to make a lot of sense.