Marshall McLuhan is one of the greatest Canadian thinkers of the 20th century. Here is a piece that describes his works a little, alongside other great thinkers of the 20th century.
20th century communication theorist Marshall McLuhan proposed that the media that humans use to communicate overshadows the meaning of the actual content that is conveyed through that media.
Let’s use Twitter as an example. What is meant by Twitter as media?
it is accessed through electronic devices (smartphones, laptops)
it is a medium full of constraints - length of post, effective lifespan of a tweet (apparently 20 minutes), acceptable content (censorship, shadowbanning), et al
it is primarily based on the written word, plus single images/memes
McLuhan would likely argue that there is effectively little difference between communication by email, Substack, Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, or television - due to the most important common fact that they are all conveyed via electronic devices.
Meanwhile, the users of Twitter would likely make much of the reach, the immediacy, the leadership of Twitter in the “social media” space. And do so in a manner that compares them favourably to Facebook (“for selfies of your vacation”) or Tiktok (“like crack for pre-teens”).
However, if the most important feature of social media is actually the fact that the way that it reaches people is exactly the same way as mass media - CNN, NBC and so on reach people, this would imply that whatever effects “media” has on people - the creator/sender; the recipient/audience; society as a whole - - it is not all that different between television from the 1960s and the smartphone of the 2020s.
The major factor that goes unexamined here is addiction.
FOR FUTURE VERSIONS:
history of “media addiction” from 1960s to present
theories of addiction as applied to social media
the commercial aspects of social media addiction
McLuhan’s thoughts on media addiction