THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

 “McLuhan stumbled across his most radical contention: that the body – both the personal body and the body politic – is shaped and transformed by its ‘media’ extensions and mediations.” - Barry Sandywell

 
We can see and feel, more and more, that our body, on the level of the nervous system and therefore on all that our nervous system touches, is being shaped and transformed by the “media” surrounding us.

The internet and its offspring create a different rhythm of internal and external interaction.  Overall the energy shifts and how the world feels changes. Each of these shifts and changes have uses and misuses. While things are in the act of changing, it becomes especially elusive how in turn to modify and react to this new world. How can we minimize the misuses and harm done by the medium, the matrix we are being bathed in?

Sometimes as it says in the Hagakure of the Samurai, the wise general retreats.  Backing off from the energy of the internet, emails, social media causes a dopamine withdrawal that most of us do not welcome.

But I contend we must all learn to back off.  That’s not been a strong suit of humankind with our out-sized brains and shrunken healthy instincts. We need to back off of the matrix we are bathed in. Actual reality is suffering from the dominance of the virtual.

A fascinating misprint happened in 1967 to the Plato of “Understanding Media”, Marshall McLuhan.  It gave us a synchronicity that can inspire us to creatively back off from the dominating media. One of McLuhan’s most famous sayings was “The Medium is the Message”…. But when the book was published the cover said, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE. This account is given by McLuhan’s biographer. W. Terrence Gordon:

“Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!'”

As in jazz, the “wrong” note can be the most liberating, and most creative ideas seem to come out of nowhere or by mistake.  They take us further than we otherwise could have gone.  Even Freud said “The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that’s when they are really making some progress.”

McLuhan was surprised by the misprint.  You might say it was a surprise made by and for the global village. And it tells how we can really make some progress.

The Medium is the Massage can mean, as commonly interpreted, that the media we use “touch” our individual and social bodies in ways that alter their form and content.  On the other hand it can mean, massage itself is the key, the medium that is the antidote to virtual reality.

As the philosopher and architect Charles Moore noted, touch “is the only sense which engages in feeling and doing simultaneously.” It is the only sense that combines not just energy but structural contact as well.  This gives it a power which virtual reality, by definition, cannot have.

So the use of healthy touch becomes more and more the medium that sends the most necessary message to us today. Actual reality needs to slough off the second skins, the neurological patternings that the medium of virtuality has layered upon us.

Who you really are as an individual radiates from within you.  Through the deepest self only can we find the authentic fulfillment of who we are and who we can be. High quality massage/bodywork is a conversation with those deepest parts of our body and mind, ones that existed long before we started naming things.

Touch, by engaging in feeling and doing simultaneously, is the most trustworthy medium of the actual and is the antidote to the compelling illusion of the merely virtual.

Healthy touch gives us truth and gives us hope.