“The medium is the message” is no doubt McLuhan’s best-known aphorism. (Levinson, 1999: 35) …_ has been well understood in general, and aptly recognized as the flagstone in McLuhan’s path to understanding media. But, unsurprisingly, much of its subtlety and implication has been wildly misinterpreted as a manifesto “against” content, or that what is communicated does not matter at all. 35  McLuhan’s attempt to shift our focus from content to medium derived from his concern that content grabs our attention to the detriment of our understanding and even perception of the medium and all else around it much as the flood of sunlight on even cloudy days blinds us to t he stars that also inhabit our sky, and of which our sun is but a special, particular case. 36-37 In other words, the user is the content of the Internet – which, it turns out, is much what McLuhan went on to say, in a metaphoric sense, about media in general. 39

McLuhan’s examples of users as content – telephone and television (he also mentions radio) – are all electronic. Telephone, of course, presents a special case, because it is intrinsically interactive, as is online communication. But why distinguish television and radio as media in which the user is “sent”? The answer can only reside in the instantaneity of electronic communication, and the impact it has on the perceiver: whereas books and newspapers bring the world to us, clearly after the fact, radio and TV bring us to the world, to the very scene  of the action. 39-40