Media Literacy Challenge #5: “The medium is the message”

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Nate Noorlander
March 24, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

Socrates famously worried about the invention of writing for the way it would change what it means to “know” something—to have it stored in marks on a page is different than having it stored in memory. One way of thinking about what Socrates was worried about was the transition from something like an oral culture, where what is known is what is remembered, to something like a literary culture, where what is known is what is written down.

In an oral culture a person might remember well, encapsulate knowledge concisely, think deeply, and communicate rhythmically through poetry, aphorisms, and clichés. In a literary culture a person might tend to be more distant, logical, propositional, linear, and analytical. These are not merely different ways of doing the same thing, and writing doesn’t merely build on speaking in a straightforward way. Rather, speaking and writing depend on and facilitate these differences. That is, they not only utilize different capacities and tendencies, they build those different capacities and tendencies.

We may have been going through an analogous transition for many decades now. If Socrates was worried about moving from an oral culture to a literary culture, an analogous concern today might be about moving from a literary culture to a culture of images. Neil Postman described this transition way back in 1985, when TV was the dominant medium of entertainment culture:

The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century…the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business. …
In watching American television, one is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. “It must be beautiful,” he said, “if you cannot read.” American television is, indeed, a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring forth thousands of images on any given day. The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music… American television, in other words, is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment.
Of course, to say that television is entertaining is merely banal. Such a fact is hardly threatening to a culture, not even worth writing a book about. It may even be a reason for rejoicing. Life, as we like to say, is not a highway strewn with flowers. The sight of a few blossoms here and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable… We may surmise that the ninety million Americans who watch television every night…think so. But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

Let’s just linger on that last line for a moment: The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. To make that a little more concrete, think of the places we sometimes—knowingly or unknowingly—expect to be entertained, where entertainment may not actually be the first priority: school, journalism, exercise, work, politics, spirituality (understood as religion or as a broad concern for living a life of meaning). Together these probably represent what many of us spend much of our time on when we’re not explicitly devoting it to entertainment or recreation. The point is not that entertainment has no value, but that the entertainment culture and paradigm tends to invade and perhaps degrade the quality and nature of other pursuits.

Perhaps now we’re ready to understand Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “the medium is the message.” What McLuhan meant when he said “the medium is the message” is just what I’ve tried to illustrate here: the medium of communication—radio, TV, book, letter, poem, song, movie, the Internet, social media, etc.—changes what gets communicated, and conditions the learner for that kind of communication. What gets communicated via Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X cannot be too long, too static, too textual, too monochromatic, too demanding, too abstract. Instead, messages that work better via entertainment mediums dominate our screentime—sensational stories, movies and TV shows, enraging conversations, distracting clickables, the unending scroll, and so on. Further, what does get communicated gets communicated via a medium that demands quick changes, soundbites, and attention-keeping stories. There are many valuable things we can communicate in these ways, but there are many valuable things that are not well-served by these boundaries, and perhaps we would do well to resist allowing these boundaries to restrict our understanding of what is possible, knowable, and valuable.

Pay attention as you consume the media over the next 48 hours—are you looking to be informed or entertained? Do you spend a lot of time consuming short-form information via social media platforms designed to entertain, not inform? (Do you agree with this characterization of social media platforms?) Can we have serious conversations via mediums that deliver information within these constraints? What constraints does the Internet more broadly put around conversation? What about cable news? Podcasts? Other mediums?

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #5: “The medium is the message”

Definitions

“the medium is the message”:

Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism suggesting that the means of communication fundamentally shape what can be communicated, and condition the audience for the kinds of learning inherent to that means of communication

typographical culture:

Neil Postman’s term for a culture that values thinking conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a culture that values reason, order, objectivity, inference-making, and delayed response; a culture that values reading and rejects contradiction and inconsistency

entertainment culture:

Neil Postman’s term for American culture in the mid-1980s, where he described trends the Internet has only made more severe—visual spectacle, clips, emotional gratification, entertainment, and unending passive consumption: “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether”:

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6 Responses

Wanda W. says:

March 28, 2026 at 3:52 am

Shorter attention spans are, I think, an evil of TV and the entertainment culture. I spoke to a librarian who bemoaned how shorter attention spans have changed her presentation of story hour over the years. I asked several parents about reading bed time stories to their children at night. They said that not only do their children not have the attention span to listen, they couldn’t just sit and read a book chapter out loud, they’d watch the movie, there was no action to watch in a book. Really? I find the action in my mind as I read to be more exciting than what Hollywood produces. I spoke to some teachers with more than two decades of teaching experience and they explained how their teaching methods have had to change to entertain sometimes more than teach, in order to keep attention. I spoke to several adults who stated that in the 50 plus years since they graduated high school they haven’t read a single book. Too boring. Books don’t keep their attention.

I didn’t know what podcasts were, but they were mentioned in your blog, so I looked into it. (Well, I didn’t know what blogs were before this course, so I must seem to be a dinosaur.) After those statements it might seem less strange when I write that I have no television, so I am not mindlessly entertained for hours a day by that medium.

I have been listening to BBC and NPR on the radio. I go to the library weekly to read the local weekly paper and the Sunday edition of the major state newspaper. The Sunday edition is more comprehensive and in depth than the daily editions and I have found that the one day is sufficient, not needing the same news to be rehashed daily.

I have watched some YouTubers do 25-45 minute researched presentations, then turn that into multiple shorts (I looked that up, it must be under three minutes and is usually under 30 seconds to be a short.) The YouTubers reported that those are their most watched videos. I find those frustrating because they can’t get into real research or anything. The shorts are little entertaining bits, not very informative.

National political news has been my undoing. What is an hour long TV show is broken into half a dozen or more segments of a few minutes long and several reporters cover the same story on the same day. There are commercials before, during, and after each segment. Podcasts don’t subject me to as many commercials and will do the whole news show in one presentation, rather than several, so I have tried podcasts for two days now and like then better than the chopped up bits on YouTube. It is also just audio, so it doesn’t have the visual distraction or entertainment of television or YouTube.

On the old TV show Dragnet, Sgt. Joe Friday reputedly said, “All we want are the facts ma’am.” Well, I wish news presenters, mainstream and independent news media would be more responsive to those that would say, “all we want are the facts” take out the opinions, the speculation, telling us what the politicians meant when they said something, leave out the spin, leave out the entertainment, just give us the facts. I think that if Left, Right, Independent, and everyone just got the unvarnished facts without any spin, the country would be more unified. I don’t think that will happen though because facts don’t have the emotional pull you discussed in blog #4 nor the entertainment expectation you discussed in this blog post.

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Kortney Garrison says:

March 30, 2026 at 5:39 pm

We are studying Unit 9 in US4 right now. Ronald Reagan is president, and man is he smoth! Even when talking about huge failures like Iran Contra, he sounds like a cowboy. He has perfect delivery and great speech writers! He blurs the line between entertainment and information in a new way.

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Hyrum Petersen says:

March 30, 2026 at 7:17 pm

The part about the shift between mediums was interesting to me, from speaking to writing to pictures, I think they all have pros and cons, and like you said, different ways of thinking. There is something to gain by using all of them in my opinion, you can expand your viewpoint and grow your brain to other ways of thinking.

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Camille P says:

March 30, 2026 at 8:29 pm

I have so many demands on my time and attention, I am embarrased to realize I am spending much more time consuming short-form information via email newsletters and social media platforms than reading the news. I realized my email had automatically sorted the newsletter blasts (from a newspaper I have paid a subscription for) into the regular email box, and I had only been looking at the “Primary” ones the email server had curated for me, based on my past reading habits, probably. I use social media for trying to keep track of friends and family, and some of them share news oriented posts (which I may or may not read in full). Perhaps this is for me more a desire for connection than for entertainment or information, although it becomes the primary source I regularly get information. The advantage I see to sharing information this way is that you have the opinions of your friends/trusted associates reflected in the posts they share. The comment section of the platform can also allow for healthy discussion (although many of the comments and discussions may not be termed healthy or productive, when the intent is to argue and contend your opinion is right/best without any listening or discussion going on). This is an advantage social media has over cable news or newspaper, where they deliver and you receive (more of an entertainment than a discussion form of information). When used appropriately, I believe that social media allows us to have more discussions than we would be able to, such as with people who we don’t sit down for lunch together or see in person as often.

As I have reflected on my current information intake, I have realized I need to do a little better digging in my email to find my news articles and pay attention to a broader scope of information sources than I have been doing.

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Brenna says:

March 31, 2026 at 8:38 am

I think the shorter clip format of social media is definitely leading to news being presented as more entertaining. Thinking about the previous discussions, in order to be noticed and paid attention to with such a small amount of time, they need to have things play to our emotions and sensations.

As someone who loves news, I was surprised when a couple of days ago, in the middle of reading an article on a well known news site, the site switched to a tik tok like feed of videos with their top stories presented.

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Emily D. says:

April 1, 2026 at 8:16 pm

Finally the words to express what has been lurking and irritating in the back of my mind. I like to be entertained as much as the next person, but when it comes to news- like Wanda W. said, I just want the facts. I don’t care about your opinions newscasters. I rarely watch any news outlets anymore because it is too exhausting. My bad for being so easily pushed emotionally, but please stop spinning the story and just tell it like it is.
But aren’t humans built to seek entertainment? Is interest and entertainment two sides of the same coin? When I read a long, dare I say boring, report, I stick with it because I have some degree of invested interest. Someone else may have less interest, but if the same information is presented in an entertaining (aka simplified) way they are willing to invest the time to consume it.
Actually rereading my words- it is obvious one requires work and the other is more passive.
But doesn’t that just go to show why so much is presented to entertain? How can anyone trying to get their message attention attract people without entertaining them?
One interesting place to look at this is church. Last Sunday one speaker gave an emotional sermon relying heavily on personal stories, seasoned with scriptures and other quotes. The second speaker was more scholarly and gave more of a presentation of available tools for enhanced scripture study. I think both were prepared and well presented. The first one had the entertainment factor, but the second was possibly more valuable. The challenge certainly has me looking and considering how things are presented and received.

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