Article

The medium is the message, and the feed’s message is interruption

Before anyone reads your post, the feed has already told them something about it: you are interrupting. That is the most important fact about social media content, and almost no content plan accounts for it.

What McLuhan meant

Marshall McLuhan coined “the medium is the message” in Understanding Media (1964). The line is quoted constantly and usually misread as “the format matters”. He meant something larger.

McLuhan wrote that the “message” of any medium or technology “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” His example was the railway. It did not invent movement or transport. It sped them up and enlarged them, and in doing so it produced new kinds of cities, work and leisure. That change, not any particular cargo, was the railway’s message.

The point is that we pay attention to content and miss what the medium is doing to us. People argued about which television programs were good while television rearranged how families spent their evenings.

He described the feed in 1969

Five years later, in an interview with Playboy, McLuhan went further:

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview”, Playboy, March 1969

He was talking about television, radio and the telephone. Social media did not exist, and the network that became the internet would not send its first message until October of that year. Read today, the sentence describes the feed closely: a constant stream of information, on a device most people keep within reach, from people and organizations they have never met.

The word that matters for the Social Media Contract is “immersing”. Nobody chooses each item in a pool. You are in it, and things reach you whether you asked for them or not. That is the condition every post is published into.

The feed’s message

Apply McLuhan to social media and the usual move is to compare platforms: LinkedIn is professional, TikTok is playful. That comparison matters, and we will come to it. But there is a prior question: what is the message of the feed itself?

The feed is a stream of things nobody specifically asked for, arriving one after another, between a friend’s holiday photos and the news. Your post does not arrive because someone went looking for it. It arrives in the middle of something else.

So the feed’s message is interruption. Every post in it starts as an interruption, whatever its content.

Earlier interruptive media had a bargain everyone understood. A television ad interrupted the show, but viewers knew the deal: free programming in exchange for the break. The feed has no standing bargain. Each post has to justify its interruption on its own, every time, to someone who can scroll past in under a second.

That is why the Social Media Contract exists. If the medium itself announces “this is an interruption”, the only defensible response is to make the interruption worth it.

Each platform says something before you do

Once you accept that the medium speaks first, platform choice stops being a distribution decision. It becomes part of what you say.

LinkedIn puts professional identity on display. A like or comment is visible to the reader’s colleagues and clients, so engaging with your post is also a statement about the reader. Content there has to be something people are willing to be seen engaging with. That is a different test from “is it interesting?”

TikTok shows most people videos from accounts they don’t follow. TikTok has said that follower count is not a direct factor in its recommendations. On that platform, almost every video is a first meeting. You are always at the glance stage, so the opening seconds carry the whole exchange.

An email newsletter is the opposite. The reader invited you into a space they control. The bargain is stronger because they asked for it, and breaking it costs more: the unsubscribe link is one click away and permanent.

A blog or article found through search answers a question the reader already had. The medium’s message is “you came looking”. That is the second stage of attention. The reader has already decided you might be worth minutes, so the page has to justify them.

Presence is a message too. A funeral home with a TikTok account says something before posting a single video. A skateboard brand with no TikTok account says something as well. Neither is automatically wrong. Both are choices the audience reads.

One idea, adapted

Say a bike shop wants to remind customers to check their tire pressure before the first spring ride.

• Instagram: a short video of a mechanic checking pressure with a cheap gauge, showing the number to aim for. The value is in the video. No link needed.
• Newsletter: a five-item spring checklist for subscribers, with tire pressure first and a note on the shop’s tune-up hours at the end. Readers asked for this, so the offer is fair.
• Blog: a full guide to tire pressure by bike type, written to be found in March by people searching for it.
• LinkedIn: nothing. A local bike shop’s customers are not looking for tire advice in their professional feed, and the shop’s time is better spent elsewhere.

The idea stayed the same. The form, the length, the ask and even the decision to post changed with the medium. Pasting the Instagram caption into all four places would have kept the words and lost the message.

What to do with this

Choose the platform before you write the post. Ask what the medium says before you decide what you will say in it.

Adapt the idea; do not repost the asset. The same point needs a different form in each place it appears.

Treat leaving a platform as a real option. You do not need to be everywhere. Being somewhere that doesn’t suit your audience or your message says something you probably don’t mean.

McLuhan’s warning was that we focus on content and ignore what the medium does. On social media, the medium tells your audience you are interrupting. Everything you publish is an answer to the question that follows: was it worth it?

Sources

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), chapter 1, “The Medium Is the Message”.
• Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”, interview by Eric Norden, Playboy (March 1969).
• TikTok, “How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou”, TikTok Newsroom (June 2020).