The Medium is the Massage: All Media Work us Over Completely

             Living in a digital age, we are the generation of smart phones, tablets, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr etc. We regularly express ourselves and our beliefs through blogs and photographs, speaking volumes for our values. We as humans are agents of our own lives, and technology is the medium through which our various messages are conveyed. Contemporary innovations in technology and the media that they produce have tremendously shaped the world we live in today. Many authors of the 20^th century have been successful at speaking about human communication, but not all have expressed a conclusive proclamation about what communication really is to us, the 21^st century generation. Marshall McLuhan dedicates a graphic text, The Medium is the Massage to this concept and makes some pretty substantial claims to better explain the impact that technology has on us. We are told that the title of this production was a typo, where massage was originally intended to be message, however the "massage" still works in quite an interesting way.  "The medium, or process of our time-electric technology-is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing- you, your family, your job, your government, your relation to "the others", and they're changing dramatically."(McLuhan) What this essentially means is that technology is drastically altering the ways we interact with our environment. 

             The former quote kind of sums up the gist of what the book seeks to explore. However the statement that is most thought provoking is,  "All media work us over completely." When I think of the term "working someone over", I think of intimate exploration and transcendence capable of extending beyond the physical. In this case, this quote is very much relevant to the title, "The Medium is the Massage", meaning it touches and rejuvenates parts of us.

         Like the above quote, the parts "touched" or altered (mostly psychologically and emotionally) include ourselves, our families, our jobs, government and relations to other individuals. "They [media] are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The Medium is the Massage."(McLuhan) I completely agree with this statement in which McLuhan argues that digital media affects us completely from the moment it reaches our brains. From television, to the internet, to newspaper, to music, messages are constantly being communicated and based on what is encoded into our brains, we respond to each stimulus in different ways.

          The most interesting way I can see this ringing a bell is in the usage of subliminal messages. I'm not exactly sure how messages triggered only in our subconscious mind can actually impact our behavior. There were a group of people who utilized visuals known as ambigrams (words art form or other symbolic representation, whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation. The meaning of the ambigram may either change, or remain the same, when viewed or interpreted from different perspectives.) to speak out about depressed teenagers, which conveyed different messages when turned upside down. 
"Singapore-based suicide prevention organization Samaritans of Singapore recently ran a series of ads which cleverly uses ambigrams to highlight the difficulty in understanding and identifying depression. 

The print ads feature images showing a positive message. However, when the ad is inverted, a sadder, more depressing message is revealed. 

The advertisement’s tagline “The signs are there if you read them” is printed upside-down so that readers will know to flip the ads over. It also reinforces the message that it is easy to miss the warning signs of depression."-DesignTaxi

 Here is an example: 

"I feel fantastic"

"I'm falling apart"

              Whether people realize it or not, even simple images placed purposefully in advertisements like this can speak volumes to people. Media messages like such are meant to provoke people, to shake people up, to make people uncomfortable enough to change either a state of mind or behavior, and to look a little deeper at what they see because it could save someone's life;one way to think of it is "working us over" hoping to get us worked up. Now whether or not these have the desired effect is debatable, but I would argue that no one can see messages like these and then "un-see" them. Maybe the effects of subliminal messages in media touch us in ways that we only see the changes too far down the line to make connections because we are constantly viewing so many things in such a short amount of time every single day. I think McLuhan would agree that there is no aspect of your brain unaccessible through media, and this is both a phenomenal and terrifying thing.