Massage Makes Sense

Your piece brings to mind Marshall McLuhan’s adage, “The Medium is the Message.” It’s amusing and relevant that most people I ask miss the fact that his famous book illustrating that concept is actually entitled, “The Medium is the Massage: an Inventory of Effects.”

The book took a disruptive visual approach to presenting content, based on creative and often provocative manipulation of text and image. It remains a pleasure to peruse (you don’t really “read” it, so much as absorb it).

The core point — of massaging the human sensorium in a way that lets information funnel in at a comfortable rate — seems to have gotten lost with the MTV-ization of all media. That creates opportunities for approaches such as yours: something for which people may not even realize how thirsty they are.