Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous dictum “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He meant that the structure of a new medium—electric light, the telephone, television—is more important than the content that travels through it. The telephone’s ability to connect people exceeds any particular conversation. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs,” McLuhan wrote. In our case, the medium is the algorithmic feed; it has scaled and sped up humanity’s interconnection
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