All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, physiological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible with out a knowledge of the way media works as environments

Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities.
Marshall McLuhan stated that the fact that more people watch television than go to church is nothing new to us, but it was one of the tell-tale signs of a cultural shift in history; a shift which has been imperceptible to most, and devastating to all.

Print can be:

- Static (Still, for example. Photographs)
- Fixed (held/Unchangeable, for example. Books/Bible)
- Linear (Goes in Line)
- Unidirectional communication (One-way Communication)

Digital can be:

- Fluid (Changeable)
- Malleable (Manipulated, shapeable)
- Simultaneous Media (Put together)
- Accessible (Online Internet, Library)
- A conversation as apposed to a monologue

Transition from painting to photograph

"An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new."

Taking the movie as an example, McLuhan argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure." Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal connections" to "configurations"

Lev Manovich

The Language of New Media

Lev Manovich is an author of books on new media theory. Manovich's research and teaching focuses on digital humanities, social computing, new media art and theory, and software studies.

In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space.

‘A new media object is not something that is fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.’