The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan

[Philip J. Fry]

Marshall McLuhan is a philosopher and media theorist from Canada. In his work The Medium is the Message, he re-hashes his old argument that the medium of society shapes society. Or, in other words, the technology people use to communicate shapes society. The features of that communication medium shapes the messages people can communicate with and how people interoperate the world.

So, for example, radio is one continuous monologue or narration or a few people talking, one at a time. It makes people really "slow" talkers and they ponder over stuff. Books is also another form where people look at words on a page, hear the audio in their head, and then judge an argument over a few hundred pages. The arguments here are well formed, well thought out, and interact with a few other people who argued their arguments in book form too, and books need to address arguments that would arise while reading, if they're good books (ie if you're reading this now, you might be wondering about X, but if you do, then the answer is Y, since Z is true and would make Y true, for example).

So, for people doing organic results on Google, it is so obvious that websites are made for GoogleBot. They are optimised with title and h1 targeting keywords and have LSI keywords based upon tools like Surfer, who tells you what LSI to add, based upon what appears on Google. Google uses PageRank, which is based upon hyperlinks. All websites that are optimised for PageRank has a lot of hyperlinks and from good sources. Same thing with Google EAT. People have EAT optimization now. Google is really changing how people consume content on the Internet as well as make content for the Internet; therefore Google is changing how people communicate. The medium is the message.

Also, for Instagram as another example, the medium shows photos of a certain size with text and maybe audio and it is shown on a feed for a few seconds. The medium here is photo based so messages here are very visual and the text are only a few words at most. People on IG "see" things and if it is in their interest, since it is on their feed, they'd click on the bio.

How can you make more money with this idea? Well, it is really obvious now that you should make websites FOR GoogleBot if you're doing SEO. Or, if you're doing IG, you make posts FOR IG. GoogleBot is one of your customers if you do SEO and you should consider it as a stakeholder in your company. Same with IG if you do IG marketing.

So, key stakeholders for my company would be investors, partners, clients, customers, viewers, googlebot, attorneys, and advertisers.

Also, some of you might say that this is common knowledge. Yes it is. How it is cool is that it is obvious and explained so plainly and clearly. It is a good mirror for society and a clear mirror is valuable.

What are your thoughts?

Also, if you don't know, I went to grad school for philosophy and dropped out, due to not liking their political agenda (lol). Gonna go to an MBA program next (cross fingers).

 

[Philip J. Fry]

I thought about this last night and Marshall McLuhan was spot on.

Google wanted HTTPS sites to rank. Guess what happens? Everyone turns their site to HTTPS.

Google wants long form content to rank. Guess what happens? Everyone writes longer blog posts.

Google uses LSI to rank. Guess what happens? Everyone copies the LSI of top articles to get a similar LSI score.

Google uses featured snippets. Guess what happens? People write their content in a way to get featured on the featured snippets.

For on-page SEO, how people write content is determined by the medium they're writing for and, in our case, it is for Google organic results. For technical SEO, sites are created to meet technical requirements of GoogleBot. For off-page SEO, link building is done to meet GoogleBot's PageRank algorithm.

The medium, organic results, is the message.

This also makes sense as to why black hatters don't get anywhere. They're going against what the medium is and exploit it. Once the exploit is patched, it is game over.

Also, along with this, people use mobile more now. Design is minimal so that it can appear easily on a phone, sites are fast to load on a cellular network, and webpages are small to load fast on a cellular network. Once again, the medium is the message.

My customer is Google and I'm making content for free for Google so that they can serve ads while also serving my content to readers. I better please my new overlord.