At the time of his death in 1980, Marshall McLuhan was principally famous for two things: for having said, “The medium is the message” and for having deeply confused an entire generation by doing so. When I was growing up in Ontario in the 1980s, I remember watching a government-sponsored commemorative TV advertisement about McLuhan, part of a series of sixty-second celebrations of eminent Canadians. In the ad, an actor portrays a tweedy, mustachioed McLuhan leading a seminar at the University of Toronto. Suddenly he has his Eureka moment: “No, no…The medium is not more important than the message it carries.…It – it's obvious. The medium is the message.” Students leave the class, excited by the power of the gnomic phrase, yet also utterly perplexed by it. Back in the classroom, the fictionalized McLuhan paces about, ranting madly in solitude. Unable to fit his rambling theories into the minute allotted, the advertisement cuts him off mid-sentence. McLuhan had undoubtedly come up with something important, the advertisement implied – but exactly what it was remained entirely unclear.

Today, McLuhan has come into focus. In part this is because the things he said about electronic media like radio and television turned out to be more applicable to digital media such as networked computers and smartphones. As Wired magazine recognized when it posthumously named McLuhan its “Patron Saint” in 1993, his theories only really began to make sense with the arrival of the internet. Since then, as the digital medium has extended further and further into our daily lives, we have come increasingly to feel the truth of McLuhan's statement, “The medium is the message.” So much of what we consume online is just the old media fed to us in new ways: Netflix is mostly made up of old TV shows and movies; YouTube is replete with MTV-style music videos and commercials; the most popular podcasts are radio shows. As McLuhan said, “The content of the medium is never the message because the content is always the old medium.” The real change comes from the new medium itself, which “creates a new situation for human association and human perception.”