The message is the medium
, said Marshall McLuhan.
This statement should be understood from the notion that the message is a disturbance of the medium, that is, the message is and is not different from the medium.
This means that we cannot understand both separately, but must always refer one to the other. In other words, noise, in the message, is nothing other than yet another message piled upon the message.
The disruption, the misunderstanding, is an accumulation of noise, noise on noise, because the message itself is a disturbance of the medium, that is to say, noise.
The noisy message is therefore not the one with too little message, but the one with too much message. This means that we need to excavate the noise layers to extract the noise of interest and ignore the overlay noise. Excavating means redoubled attention and care, but also a certain form of violence, because we are going to extract something from something.
To say it is cognitive overload is to say it is a surplus of knowledge that cannot be known, because knowledge is the medium of knowing.
The noisy message is not the one that does not teach us, but the one that teaches us too much, the one we need the time of excavation to be able to learn from.
To say we need time is to say we need more medium. For life exists within time.
To say that the message is a disturbance of the medium, to affirm its identity in difference, its difference in identity, is to understand the grain of destruction that lies at the heart of every creation, is to realize that every instant of life contains a drop of death, otherwise life could never be otherwise than it is, (something) other than itself, that is, something other than always the same life. In other words, every time brings with|in it|self a counter-time [a contretemps, as the French say], every instant, an eternity.
To wrap things up: saying the medium is the message
is the same as saying the message is the medium. But the medium for what? What comes (forth) through it? What happens because of it? What exists due to it? What reaches out from (within) it? What is life the medium for? What is language a medium for? In other words: a medium that is a message, which is to say, a message that is a medium, can only be a pure medium. Note it is not a medium pure (from dirt, from noise), but a pure medium, that is, the medium itself is pure mediality, pure mediation, no ends in sight, serving no higher (or merely external) purposes other than mediating mediation (itself).
Lotsa stuff to chew on.
