Imagine that you’re consuming the same content, but from three different mediums: a TV broadcast, a newspaper column, and a 30 seconds TikTok. The facts appear to be identical, yet each version feels completely different from another. You watch, read, and react differently each time. A theorist, Marshall McLuhan, suggested that this difference between the means through which we consume the content is the whole point.
Medium Theory: what is it?
Medium theory is the idea that the technology we use to communicate shapes us as much as the information it carries. McLuhan summed it up as “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7). He argued that we obsess over the content we consume while our habits, attention, and society is quietly being transformed by the medium. One of his famous example was the electric light. The electric light has no content, yet it transformed how people live by making night time work and social life possible.
TikTok as a case study
TikTok could be taken as a perfect modern example. Its contents are endless: dances, recipes, jokes, and politics. But the medium itself has features that matter more than any single video:
- Short length: Ideas must be compressed into seconds, so nuance is often the first casualty.
- Infinite scroll: There is no natural stopping point, unlike the end of a chapter or a TV episode.
- Algorithmic feed: The platform decides what comes next, shaping what you see and what feels normal.
Postman (1985) highlighted that the television turned serious subjects into entertainment because the medium rewards whatever is visual and quick. The same logic applies here. It may look identical in the feed when we watch a teacher explaining history and a comedian telling a joke, both competing for the same two seconds of attention.
Blurring the lines
Meyrowitz (1985) argued that the electronic media change social behavior by changing who has access to whom. Social media platforms play a role in this too. When the politicians, celebrities, and all your classmates appear in the same space, in the same format, the authority feels flatter, and anyone can become “famous” overnight.
Ong (1982) suggested that the shift from spoken culture to written culture changed the way people think. The move towards short videos, today’s world, appears to be doing something similar, favouring quick, emotional, easily shared ideas over long, slow reasoning.
Why it matters
We can’t jump to the conclusion that TikTok is entirely good or bad. Through TikTok, many creators got recognition, many small businesses flourished, and underrepresented voices were heard. However, medium theory asks us to look past what we are watching, and question what the format is doing to us and to our society. Are we learning to think in 15 seconds bursts? Is it getting harder for us to sit with a long article?
Next time you scroll, try noticing not the video but the scroll itself. That’s the message.
Reference list
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ong, W.J. (1982) Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.
Postman, N. (1985) Amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Viking Penguin.
