The Medium is the Message

This holiday season, a friend of mine and I attempted to have an entire conversation through the social media network, Twitter. After a while, it got very tiring, being limited by the character count. Nowadays, there are so many ways to communicate with people, its almost ridiculous. It seems that face-to-face conversation is uncommon, with the busy lives of everybody. There are various methods of instant messaging, social network, mobile communications and electronic mail that just becomes more convienient.

Marshall McLuhan was the one who said that "the medium is the message." If you really think about it, now that there are so many ways to get the message across, there really can be implications based on the way you pass your message on. It also bases very much on your individual life.

For instance, if you are a very intense "Tweeter," and most of you probably know someone like this, Twitter is perhaps your way of sending and recieving messages. I would reach someone like this via Twitter because I know that's the most likely channel which I can get a response from him or her. Same for Facebook. Maybe you've got a really cool smartphone and can do a whole bunch of things with it. Perhaps texting is your favourite form of communication.

The point is that with all this media available, what can be said about the medium of the message? Can you imply that, for instance, a break-up via text message means something different than a break-up through Facebook? If you get an event invitation for a party through Facebook, and its someone whom you're not too close with, can you assume they just invited all their Facebook friends, and it really wasn't a personal invite, as if they asked you in person?

I think that these are extreme examples of safe assumptions of the implications that can be read into various forms of media.