A rede de relações é a mensagem

«Quoting the famous phrase by Marshall McLuhan "the medium is the
message" [1], today one may say that the network is the message of the
medium Internet. The networking phenomenon was anticipated by the
practice of mail art long before Internet evolved, just as the
pointillism of Seurat could be considered prophetic with respect to the
subsequent development of the television image. Until recently in
America the term network was used to describe the television medium, but
today it regards a much larger and vaster connective dimension, which is
the Internet. Network becomes "the net of social relations", it is the
message transmitted by the Internet medium, which is in turn the net
which technically permits transmission.

The net of relations represents the message of the technical net. If the
medium conditions the message (though converging on the Internet, TV,
books, radio, telephones, cell phones do transmit specific messages), on
the internet (a medium based on the creation of connection nets), the
message is the social relationships all these media generate.

All this leads to the role of the user. McLuhan often jested that "If
the medium is the message, then the user is the content". What he
implied, I think, is that media were not just support or even
conditioners of messages, they were prime and foremost environments. The
medium thus could shape both the content and the user. If the medium
conditions the message, the user becomes the content of this message,
and this goes for all the forms of networking. With the extension of the
Internet, one's position within the flow of information changes: today
the net allows us to diffuse our thoughts in a global manner; whereas
before these affirmations were merely an utopia, now one may experiment
with them as a concrete phenomenon. Once on-line we quite literally
become content for the Internet.

The structure of the medium also conditions one's perception of one's
own identity: the fact that one becomes an active lever in the
distribution and creation of digital contents also determines a change
in the net structures and in our way of communicating and relating with
the outside world. People carry an aura of communications around them.
In the case of TV, television images speak directly to the body of the
viewer. Television addresses one's inner state and the electron beam
paints its sensorial and emotional dimensions directly unto the viewer's
nervous system; it is a form of physical action which is conveyed
through sound and moving images. But with the Internet, we share the
responsibility of making sense with the technology; we are not just
consumers of information, but also producers, creators, and our
production becomes an active part of network dynamics. Just check this
out on Youtube.  De Kerckove (2006)