The medium is the message. The phrase was coined by philosopher Marshall McLuhan decades back to push us to think about the various tools of expression around us — the technology through which ideas are conveyed — as more than just neutral delivery devices. The medium itself “does something to people,” McLuhan wrote. “It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were.” When new advances in media increase the pace and scale of all of it, that leads to a “general roughing up” as
