The Medium is the Massage

McLuhan's conceptions about technological development involve complex modernist and structuralist ideas. He employs Weberian differentiation i.e. the fragmentation and bureaucratisation of technological life whose impact if felt through all the levels of human operations and practical life. He thus famously claims that the Medium is the Message meaning that the interaction of these complex structures can only be understood in a total unity of the message and the medium.
The impact of the Medium, an 'extension of ourselves' is both social and psychological, basically scaling up through technology. As technology is scaled up, it demands new and newer roles within the automated processes, as previous roles become redundant.Human relationships themselves are restructured via the machines, both vis a vis others and to oneself.McLuhan distinguishes between the fragmentation of human relationships in machine technology, and the decentralisation and integration of relationships through 'automation technology'.McLuhan extends the structural idea beyond the relationship between the signifier and the signified, to understand the relation of technology and society. He draws an analogy of electric light arguing that a surgery or night sports are inescapably the Medium as they form the "content" of light on the rationale that without light, they cannot take place or even be thought of.