It's not necessarily a good synopsis of Marshall McLuhan, but the idea that the medium itself is an essential part of the message (or massage) is vital to understanding how human consciousness is influenced not merely by the content of new media but by the very form of those new media. As a person who speaks for hours and writes longer works than blog posts for a living, I'm very worried about the effect abbreviated forms of communication are having on the capacity of people to form complex, extended ideas. I use facebook, and yet the vast vapid content of most mirco-blog content is dismaying. I don't use Twitter or texting, but I am unswayably convinced that the bumper sticker is not merely just inadequate for serious human communication but that the prevalence of bumper-sticker scale communication is causing a frightening and unprecedented erosion in the real capacity for meaningful human thought and communication. If the form of communication you engage in has a direct influence on the way you order your thoughts and process other communication, I'm genuinely concerned about our future from looking at our youth.
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