The Medium And The Message

When Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”, one of the concerns was the degree of passivity of the audience; that television encouraged a relationship with content that lacked the active attention of other forms of media with a resulting loss of critical thinking.

Perhaps now the issue is that we are around the back side of that circle and are now writing content that is not meant to be absorbed; that our publication rules no longer encourage an author to pay attention to the details that will engage an audience.

• “It’s just a text, spelling doesn’t count.”
• “140 characters is enough for everything useful.”
• “Nobody cares about readable fonts, just make it look cool.”

And yet, as with many things that are produced rather than crafted, the opportunity and the motivation to do create something special is lost – sadly, too often the work suffers.

Note: This is a test message. The content here can be, and should be, ignored.