The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage (1967)
I've found McLuhan a little impenetrable in the past, or perhaps not so much impenetrable as so information rich that it can be difficult to process what he's saying. The Medium is the Massage seems to represent a loosely populist concession, representing a few of his core ideas in a more accessible form - almost a pop art translation with heavy emphasis on the pictures, not least because the pictures carry part of the argument. McLuhan's argument seems to be that the electronic communications revolution of the twentieth century influenced the nature of the messages which passed between different parts of society, favouring non-linear narratives and thus allowing for greater spontaneity within society as a whole, hence the revolutionary or reforming tendencies of sixties culture. If it helps make sense of the suggestion, a linear narrative might be, for example, the nineteenth century notion of progress as something moving forward with clear and coherent purpose. McLuhan suggests that the switch to a non-linear narrative has created something like a global village, as distinct, I suppose, from a global corporation or corporations. McLuhan's conclusion additionally seems to account in part for the rise of postmodernism and is essentially optimistic in proposing that a better, more developed society should result.

Weirdly, it's fairly easy to see how human society in 2020 seems to represent a continuation of McLuhan's model, despite our being in an arguably quite different, even devolved place to that which he foresaw, possibly because the last half century of technological progress has comprised revision and development of existing forms rather than innovation on the scale of the printing press being an innovation. Also because postmodernism seems to have proven unusually conducive to the investiture of naked emperors.

That's what I've taken from it anyway. I could be wrong.