En la VIII Convención Anual de la Media Ecology Association, tuve el honor de participar en un panel con Eric McLuhan y otros destacados investigadores. Al concluir nuestras intervenciones, una participante formuló la siguiente pregunta a Eric McLuhan:

-Si el medio es el mensaje, cuál es el contenido-

La respuesta de Eric McLuhan fue tan rápida como contundente.

-Nosotros somos el contenido.

El día de hoy, a través de Fernando Gutiérrez, Eric McLuhan me envió el presente texto con el propósito de ampliar su atinada respuesta:

Commenting on something written or said in 1967…
Postscript, 1971

In the four years since making the above observations I have discovered very many things about media and education. It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments. As environments, all media have all the effects that geographers and biologists have associated with environments in the past. Environments shape their occupants. One person, complaining about my observation that “the medium is the message,” simply said: “McLuhan means that the medium has no content.” This remark was extremely useful to me because it revealed the obvious, namely, the content of any medium is the user. This applies equally to electric lights, any language whatever, and, of course, housing, motor cars, and even tools of any sort. It is obvious that the user or content of any medium is completely conformed to the character of this man-made environment. His entire sensory life arranges its hierarchies and dominance in accordance with the environment in which he operates.

If we say “mist on the moors tonight,” we are inclined to call it poetic. When the sensory inputs are dim, the sensory response is correspondingly strong. This is why small children are always “poetic” in their responses to anything at all. A child’s sensory reception is very selective, somewhat in the manner of what is offered our senses by “abstract” art. And just because the sensory offering is meagre, the sensory response is full. As we grow older, we dim down the sensory responses, and increase the sensory inputs, turning ourselves into robots. That is why art is indispensable for human survival. Art perpetually dislocates our usual sensory responses by offering a very abstract or meagre and selective input. SEE PAGE 7, ABOVE.

The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike… Nearly everything that I write is concerned with areas of exploration in which I am actively engaged in discovery. That is why I say “I have no point of view.” Anyone engaged in exploration uses every available approach, every available foothold, every accessible crevice to which to cling as he scales the unknown rock-face. The actual process of dialogue and discovery is not compatible with packaging of familiar views.

A person engaged in exposition has nothing new to say, and he cannot communicate the effect of participating in the process of discovery. The TV age demands participation in this process and it is for that reason that all existing education, insofar as it is concerned with expounding what is already known, is entirely unacceptable to students….

—From "Education in the Electronic Age." Printed as Chapter 12.3 in The Best of Times / The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education. Eds., H. A. Stevenson, R. M. Stamp, and J. D. Wilson. Toronto and Montreal: Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada Limited, pages 515-531. Rpt. from Interchange (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Vol. 1, No. 4, 1970, pp. 1-12. Text of an address to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education of the Schools of Ontario, on January 19, 1967. This passage forms the last two pages, 11-12.

Recomendamos la lectura de "Foreword", reciente artículo de Eric McLuhan, publicado en el número de Razón y Palabra en línea.