McLuhan frequently punned on the word 'message', changing it to 'mass age', 'mess age', and 'massage'. Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from 'lineal connections' to 'configurations.' Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the 'content of any medium is always another medium' – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph. Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed 'the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure'. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled 'the scale and form of human association and action'. McLuhan says 'Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium'.

The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan uses the term 'message' to signify content and character. He showed that artifacts such as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content. McLuhan proposes that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. ' The medium is the message' is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and the name of the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. The phrase was coined by Marshall McLuhan

Marshall mcluhan extensions of man