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Marshall McLuhan¡¦s main thesis, which he developed and maintained throughout his career, is that media has a deep and invisible effect on the world, society, and the way in which we view society. His famous catch phrase ¡V ¡§the Medium is the Message¡¨ refers to his theory that the media is what is important, and regardless of the content, the effect will still be the same. To understand McLuhan¡¦s theories we must try to forget the symbolic content of what is being said, or the superficial interpretation of the actual picture. Instead we must look deeper into the whole infrastructure of the medium itself. McLuhan described the content of medium as ¡§the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind¡¨ (McLuhan 1964:18). For instance, the same words may be spoken face-to-face, printed on paper, or presented on television. But three different messages may be presented simply because of the different senses used to perceive these words. McLuhan argues that modern communication, including radio, television and computers would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic and philosophical consequences. The dominant medium of any age controls people and reconnects forms of relationship with the world based on which sensory motor apparatus is being used. The phonetic alphabet, printing press and the telegraph were turning points in society because they changed the way people thought about themselves, and even changed the ways in which they experienced the world. McLuhan divides the history of social man into three eras: the Tribal Age, the Age of Print, and the Electronic Age. The Tribal Age is marked by a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life (McLuhan & Zingrone, 1997:239). The phonetic alphabet and the print revolution changed everything, and in trading an ¡¦eye for an ear¡¦ resulted in a shift towards sequential, lineal thought, reducing the use of all the senses to a merely visual code (McLuhan 1962: 45).
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