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The Platform is the Message
‘Clegg insisted individuals were responsible for their own actions on 6 January, and would not say if he believed Facebook bore any responsibility for amplifying toxic messaging such as Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election.’
Guardian, 10 October 2021
Neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally individualist in its concentration on choice and responsibility. Yet executives like Clegg, who hold leading positions at some of the most powerful digital corporations like Facebook are not unaware that, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’.
I’ve been teaching McLuhan on the Digital Media module I am a guest lecturer for at the University of Westminster in London. McLuhan explained the meaning of ‘the medium is the message’ by saying that “the personal and social consequences of any medium… result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs”, McLuhan said.
