The Medium is The Message

At first, I wasn't quite clear with the concept of "the Medium is the Message"; but after reading this article, I was convinced with what Marshall McLuhan referred in the passage, though not absolutely agreed with, at least worthy of attention.
I 'm pretty interested in the part that he talked about the "medium" brought out by the new technology and how they affect the world because the new technological invention can be directly perceived  through out senses. Railways and airplanes are mediums that bring out new living patterns and those are "messages".
The most direct way that "the Medium is the Message" makes sense to we is that in last a few days there were big incidents happening both in US and my country China: Boston had the Marathon Bombing, 3 dead and hundreds injured; China had the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 160 lives and more than 2000 injured. In both incidents, people receive the fastest information from the internet instead of the traditional medium. The internet and the invention of social networking website gives pressure to the traditional medium since it changes the way how we get used to receive information; we are not satisfied by the way we receive news as before, and the change of technology and our demand force it to improve again, that process happens interchangeably, so "the Medium is the Message".

Here is a short video from google introducing the data of people using mobile now. "Mobile is so big. It's changing and creating new customer behaviors. Mobile is entertaining us in new ways."We are spoiled by the convenience it brought to us and it is forced to be more perfect. Message is the ways and patterns that it brings to us, which still holds Marshall Mcluhan's idea from long time ago.

Is the medium really the message?

I'll come right out and say that I don't completely buy McLuhan's assertion. He seems obsessed with industrialization and links the specificity of transportation to art. I don't disagree that the railway "accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions," but an artistic medium is different from an industrial process. In arguing that the medium is the message, I feel that McLuhan is overly homogenizing entire styles of art. If the content is just the distracting juicy piece of meat that he asserts it is, why bother making new art? Such an emphasis on form over content devalues the artist and overvalues the engineer or inventor who creates new forms of artistic expression. Different artists utilize a given medium in very different ways, even within similar schools of thought (e.g.: the French New Wave).
McLuhan argues that "the effect of the movie form is not related to its program content." However, I don't quite understand what he means by "movie form." Does he mean to assert that any series of images projected in front of a lightbulb on a moving strip of images is essentially the same? One only needs to juxtapose the work of Bela Tarr and Sergei Eisenstein to realize the absurdity of such an assertion. Film can explore time and space, but also can sacrifice either notion for the other or lose track of both. Stan Brakhage's more abstract pieces (those that involve directly painting on strips of film) illustrate this point. Below I've included a clip from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies and Eisenstein's October, just to illustrate two very different filmic experiences. Even more different might have been a clip from a Tarkovsky film, but I just really love the opening scene to Werckmeister Harmonies.

Unless You Will

Here is the link to the Unless You Will website, an intriguing online magazine published bi-monthly. And here is a link to the blog. More amazing photos.