In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and 
dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit 
of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical 
fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the 
personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of 
any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is 
introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by 
any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the 
new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is 
true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates 
roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their 
work and human association that our preceding mechanical 
technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to 
say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the 
machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the 
ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another