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- Rebellious Thoughts #73 - 🤘 The Medium Is the Message
Rebellious Thoughts #73 - 🤘 The Medium Is the Message
By Gus Balbontin
Edition #73
Hey Rebels!
As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.
I know I know it’s been a while and I have lost my consistency and well... I needed to make some space and something has to give… “let go” remember??!!
Good side is that you are getting less intrusion in your inbox from my crazy thinking!
And remember if you do miss me or need some lateral thinking, there’s all these newsletters I have already written (73 editions so far!)!!!!
Recently, a close friend of mine that reads this newsletter says “dude I cut bits and pieces of the newsletter and send it to my team and contacts to read or make a point”…
The medium is the message.
Years ago, I remember hearing this a lot at Lonely Planet… it was a way for us in innovation to argue that the book medium alone had specific properties that, when translated into any digital medium, didn’t disappear.
Eg. you write a book first and then you use the content to make a website or an app. Truth is, the apps and the website always had some of the book DNA, throttling the true potential of the new medium.
This is where it comes from:
"The medium is the message" is a famous phrase coined by Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man."
This concept suggests that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship where the medium influences how the message is perceived and understood by the audience. McLuhan argued that the medium itself, not just the content it carries, has social effects and transforms human experience.
I observe this all over the place regularly.
In education… where the medium (a building you attend to) defines the actual education experience you are able to provide…
Another way to think about it… What sort of biology class would you be able to run if the medium were the forest instead of a school building?
In comms inside a business… Slack, email or bumping into someone at the office all directly and profoundly impact the message… even if the message is the same, sometimes you have to be incredibly strategic about the medium you choose to deliver it.
The city layout of LA vs the city layout of Paris is the message… it’s the experience.
In fact, it can be as powerful as Paris, encouraging pedestrian circulation, and LA literally making it almost impossible to move on foot.
Same food - different plate = creates a diff message….
Same drink - different glass = diff message!
I am now blowing glass, as many of you know, and if you look at the pic of a simple glass of water in my own made glass vs an industrially made one… tell me…. for real…. how much more tempting does mine look???!!! Hahaha… the message from one screams “I have spent hours in the hands of my creator and there's no one else like me”, the other screams “I was made in a factory and there are thousands like me”.
mine vs. industrially made
You spending physical cash in your hand vs you tapping your phone.. two diff mediums result in a very different bank balance! Hahah
And it obeys to a certain degree a similar structure to fractals… the book is the medium and it’s the message, and the font choice you make is also the medium and it becomes the message.
Example from one of my fave books ever “The Art of Looking sideways”
“Imagine strolling down a country road and coming across this sign, daubed in paint on a weather-beaten board. It expresses far more than the immediate message. It also says: “I am a farmer, my chickens run around freely, and the eggs were probably laid today”
“…walking further along the road, you come across another sign, equally crude and daubed in paint on a weather-beaten board tacked on a leaning wood post:
It also says “you’d be out of your mind to even think about it”
The way we measure time changes the experience… sends a different message!
Thinking about time as seasons or sunrise to sunset makes a connection to the environment, culture, and is larger and useful for certain things
An analogue watch is far more flexible, less precise… around 12:30 means when the arrow is somewhere around there..
A digital clock is precise, and if it has seconds it’s easy to see you are 2:36min late!
(Side note: Every atom in the universe experiences its own “now” and these measuring mediums allow us to align NOW (an illusion) but help us organise ourselves….)
CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK:
Pick one area of your life or business and change the medium through which it happens.
→ Deliver a message you normally write via email… in a voice note / or a handwritten note!
→ Take a Zoom call… while walking in nature.
→ Teach a concept… using a LEGO set.
→ Pitch your service… with a meme.
Then tell me what happened.
Anyway... you get the point…
Think of your business and how your business runs… think of your life and the mediums in which it occurs?
When does the medium in which you exist actually define the experience you have and the life you live… are you the result of the mediums in which you exist?
What if you were served on a different plate? ;-)
Yew!
Love
Gus
Recommendations:
If you’re curious about how to actually use AI in real life—not just read about it—check out HumanAI, a newsletter by my good friend Lucas.
In the past month, he’s built:
A digital clone of himself (yes, seriously)
A podcast hosted by his AI twin
An AI habit tracker
A career skill analyzer
And a full-on productivity system using nothing but AI tools
He shares the behind-the-scenes of all of his AI experiments —practical, weird, and wildly useful.
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