The Medium is the Massage

In the mid-1960s, Professor Marshall McLuhan noted that the new medium of television was changing how people processed the data of their lives. Its sequence of five second video shots and 20 second sound bites were re-programming our attention spans. For him, the medium of TV was ‘messaging’ to us that its five and 20 second pattern
was the optimum way to structure our communications. At a more subliminal level, he saw that a medium also ‘massages’ us, meaning that any medium works us over and kneads us into a format compatible with itself. Eventually our default setting is to see our life through the eyes of that medium and, at a deeper level, a change in medium can change the eyes of our heart.

The default medium, in the current pandemic, has been fear; fear of the disease, fear of dying, fear of each other, and fear for the future of our children. Fear has invaded our land.

The book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 21 opens with “...An invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror.” Bob Dylan’s song, “All Along The Watchtower”, lifts its theme from Isaiah 21 and starts with the line, “‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the Joker to the Thief, 'There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.'” After a bit of dialogue between the Joker and the Thief, the Thief says, “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” In other words, this is the time for truth and apocalypse. In the distance, from their vantage point on the watchtower, the lookouts spy something, and the song ends with, “Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl.”