Message or Massage?

Now that my Wiki is up and running, just could not resist the temptation to revisit Marshall McLuhan. If you click on the image at left, you can read it more clearly. For those who came of age post-Internet, here is a tutorial: http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/. Lest we think that anything be completely original, McLuhan anticipated not only the demise of print media as we know it, as exemplified by the current painful metamorphosis of traditional newpapers, but also coined the term "Global Village" long before it was a defunct--or was that "de-funked"?--old-hippie store near the West Bank of the Mississippi.
McLuhan's most oft-quoted aphorism (pithy phrase) is "The medium is the message..." The title is usually incorrectly cited, due to a typo which left his influential book being entitled The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan did not object to the typo, and liked the ambiguity. " Mass-age?" ..or maybe "massage" of one's brain by various media...or...? Re "message" vs. "massage" - maybe some of the media specialists (or others) had courses in "Media Studies" or the like in high school or college? Gratefully, I was spared the tortured discourse of academics who specialize in some permutation of "Media/Gender/Cultural Studies" (akin to "21st-Century Intellectual Basket Weaving 101").
But the real message here is about McLuhan and what we have been up to all year in MILI. We are fully-formed adults. Our students are not. We cannot underestimate the force exerted by the new media on the shaping of their ability to reason, on their relationships to others, and their supposed "ownership" of their knowlege and educations. The media that they and we use are the real message and are shaping us in ways that we still do not fully understand.
As for the myth of the "global village," watch for another post. It's really all about the money, always has been, and always will be in the end. You did notice that PBWiki has "gone uptown" with its logo so as to attract more solid, paying customers, didn't you? Very few people in the real world of business would ever take a cute little "pb sandwich" logo seriously for long!