The Medium Is the Message

“The medium is the message” is something my high school sociology teacher drilled into our heads. He was an eccentric, passionate character, and for whatever reason, that phrase stuck with me long after I walked out of his classroom.

At the time, I think I mostly understood it as one of those phrases teachers repeat enough times that eventually it gets permanently lodged in your brain.

Now, making videos for Venture Co, I keep coming back to it.

The phrase was coined by Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian born in Edmonton who eventually taught at the University of Toronto. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan basically asked people to stop looking only at the content they were consuming and start paying attention to the technology carrying it.

Most of us judge the media by what is inside it.

Is the movie good? Is the song catchy? Is the video funny?

McLuhan’s question was different:

What changes when a story comes through a book instead of a television? What happens when music becomes something we can carry everywhere? What happens when video stops being something we sit down to watch and starts appearing inside a feed that never ends?

McLuhan argued that the content can actually distract us from something much bigger: the way technology itself changes how we think, communicate and experience the world.

What matters is not only what a medium shows us, but the scale, pace and pattern it introduces into our lives.

That idea feels even more relevant now than it probably did when I first heard it in high school.

And it has become a weirdly useful way of understanding my own work.

The footage matters. The music matters.

But so do the cuts. The static. The CRT television. The vertical frame. The phone somebody eventually watches it on.

None of those things are neutral.

They change the edit.

McLuhan viewed technology as an extension of the human body.

The wheel extends the foot. Print extends the eye. Electronic media extends the nervous system.

But he also connected these technological extensions to numbness and what he called “auto-amputation.”

I don’t read that as literally meaning every new technology makes us worse at something. What interests me more is the trade-off. Technology gives us a new ability, we reorganise ourselves around that ability, and eventually the extension becomes so normal that we barely notice how dependent we have become on it.

I can’t help seeing some version of that happening with artificial intelligence.

Watching AI jump from a bumbling chatbot to producing hyper-optimised visual slop everywhere, from Fruit Love Island to bizarre algorithmic fever dreams, spooked me a little.

The obvious conversation about AI is always about what it can make.

Better images. Better video. More convincing results. Faster output.

But the question I find more interesting is what happens to us when making those things becomes almost instant.

What happens to wanting to learn a tool?

What happens to sitting with an idea that isn’t working?

What happens to making something badly, realising it looks like shit, and slowly figuring out why?

AI gives us a massive extension of output. But I worry about what happens when the output becomes more important than the experience of actually making the thing.

I started Venture Co partly as a reaction to that feeling.

I already had a light background in web design and graphics, and I missed those early-2010s music videos that created entire visual worlds around songs. I wanted to sit with an editing timeline, mess around, make mistakes and slowly figure out what looked cool to me.

Not because handmade work is automatically better.

Not because I think AI has no place in creativity.

I just don’t want to lose the part of myself that enjoys making something piece by piece.

And there’s still a contradiction here.

Venture Co partly came out of being uncomfortable with technology moving towards instant, frictionless creation, but the things I make are also completely shaped by technology.

I don’t really have a neat answer for that.

Maybe the point isn’t to reject the extension.

Maybe it’s just to notice what it’s extending, what it’s replacing, and what parts of yourself you actually want to keep.

When I started editing, I wasn’t trying to prove a media theory.

I was just trying to make stuff that looked cool to me.

But as my style developed, I started noticing connections between what I was doing and McLuhan’s ideas about hot and cool media.

Broadly, hot media give you a lot of information and leave less for the audience to fill in. Cool media leave more gaps, meaning the viewer has to participate more to complete what they’re seeing.

I wouldn’t literally call my edits a “cool medium.” They’re high-resolution digital videos packed with sound, colour, images and movement.

But I like the question behind McLuhan’s distinction:

How much does the medium give you, and how much does your brain have to fill in?

Because my edits are basically built out of fragments.

A cartoon becomes a vintage clip.

A vintage clip becomes a modern music video.

A face becomes a movement.

A movement becomes a completely unrelated image that, for whatever reason, felt right when I put it there.

There isn’t always an obvious narrative connecting those things.

But there is a rhythm.

The viewer has to find the relationship.

Whether it’s my own attention span or a brain reshaped by internet culture, long takes usually don’t hold me.

My editing process normally starts with a 15-to-30-second audio clip that I play over and over and over again.

Sometimes I smoke a joint, close my eyes and just listen to it until I can almost see where the cuts should happen.

Then I start gathering footage.

Most of my clips last only one or two seconds.

You don’t get much time to sit comfortably with an image.

A cartoon.

A vintage clip.

A modern video.

A face.

A movement.

A flash of colour. B 

Then it’s gone.

Your brain has to grab whatever it can before the next image replaces it.

And this is where the whole thing gets a little funny.

Part of the reason I started Venture Co was because I felt uncomfortable watching technology move towards instant, frictionless creation.

But the actual editing style I developed is completely shaped by the internet.

The one-second cuts. The constant stimulation. The need for something new to happen immediately.

I’m not standing outside internet culture judging it.

I’m making things with a rhythm I absorbed from it.

And that might actually be the more interesting McLuhan question.

Not just:

What am I doing with the medium?

But:

What has the medium already done to me?

My editing rhythm usually looks something like this:

clip → static → clip → static → clip

Perfectly smooth digital transitions can feel kind of sterile to me.

One image dissolves beautifully into another. Everything flows. Nothing interrupts you.

Static does the opposite.

It breaks the flow.

It gives one image a hard ending before the next one starts.

I think of it almost like punctuation.

The clips are the words.

The static is the period.

But the static also adds this physical texture to something completely digital.

It reminds me of old televisions, damaged VHS tapes, weak signals and machines that don’t work perfectly.

Obviously, the static in my videos isn’t real interference. I’m literally adding it myself.

But the association is still there.

For a split second, instead of only paying attention to the image, you become aware of the idea that the image is travelling through a machine.

The technology stops being invisible.

And the interruption becomes part of the message.

At first, I made full-screen videos.

Then, while I was working on a Tyler, the Creator edit, I started noticing TikTok videos displayed inside smaller centred panels instead of stretching across the entire vertical canvas.

I tried it myself.

Then I built a retro CRT television around the panel.

And the TV was born.

Almost immediately, I heard my old sociology teacher’s voice in my head:

“The medium is the message.”

The footage hadn’t necessarily changed.

But suddenly it felt different.

Putting an image inside a fake CRT obviously doesn’t magically turn my phone into an old television. Somebody is still watching a digital video on TikTok or YouTube through a smartphone.

But the container changes how I read the image inside it.

Suddenly it feels broadcast.

A little more distant.

A little older.

Like something recovered.

And that’s what interests me about the CRT.

It brings the memory of one medium into another.

I have a television in my living room, but like basically everyone else, I spend way more time watching things on my phone or tablet because it’s easier.

The smartphone might be one of the clearest examples for me of what McLuhan meant by technology becoming an extension of ourselves.

If my phone dies or I leave it at home, I immediately feel like something is missing.

My camera, messages, maps, music, calendar, entertainment and connection to basically everything are sitting inside one object.

You don’t really notice how attached you are until it disappears.

And yet, I sometimes miss the constraints of older television.

The commercial breaks.

The scheduled 8 p.m. premieres.

The fact that if you weren’t home, you might actually miss something.

Obviously, that was less convenient.

But there was something about everybody watching the same thing around the same time and talking about it the next day.

Now everything is available everywhere, all the time.

Which is amazing.

But somehow when everything is always available, individual things can also start to feel more disposable.

And I think that’s part of what I’m nostalgic for.

Not just old shows.

Not just CRT screens.

I’m nostalgic for an older pace of watching things.

That’s what I like about putting my edits inside the television.

I’m taking hyperactive, one-second cuts shaped by modern internet culture and forcing them inside an object I associate with scheduled television, physical hardware and limits.

The outside suggests waiting.

The inside refuses to slow down.

That contradiction is what makes the CRT frame interesting to me.

And then it gets even weirder when I think about how many screens are actually involved.

The original footage becomes part of my edit.

The edit goes inside a fake CRT television.

The television goes inside a vertical video.

The vertical video gets uploaded to TikTok or YouTube.

Then somebody watches the whole thing through a smartphone.

So you basically end up with:

footage → edit → television → vertical video → platform → phone

A screen inside a screen inside another screen.

And every layer changes what came before it.

The edit creates the rhythm.

The CRT brings in nostalgia.

The vertical canvas immediately places it back in contemporary internet culture.

The platform drops it into an endless feed surrounded by thousands of other videos fighting for somebody’s attention.

And then the whole old-TV illusion is being experienced through one of the most modern and frictionless media devices we have.

That’s the part I didn’t really understand when I first started making these.

I thought the CRT was just an aesthetic.

I liked how it looked.

And honestly, that’s still reason enough for me to use it.

But now I understand why it changes the work so much.

The frame isn’t neutral.

The static isn’t neutral.

The pacing isn’t neutral.

Even the phone isn’t neutral.

They’re all doing something to the images inside them

The CRT television started as a visual experiment.

Now it has basically become part of Venture Co’s visual language.

It makes modern footage feel recovered from another time. It lets nostalgia and internet culture exist inside the same frame. It takes this ridiculously fast modern editing style and stuffs it inside an object associated with a completely different way of consuming media.

But I’m also not actually escaping modern media by doing that.

The old television is still inside a vertical video.

The vertical video is still inside a feed.

The feed is still on a phone.

And honestly, I like that contradiction.

Venture Co partly came out of wanting to push back against the direction technology seemed to be taking creativity.

But my work is also completely shaped by technology.

The internet shaped my attention span.

Old television shaped the aesthetic.

Editing software made the work possible.

TikTok shaped the format.

My phone is probably where most people will eventually see it.

So maybe I’m not interested in separating “human” creativity from technology as cleanly as I initially thought.

Maybe I’m more interested in noticing the relationship.

What does the technology give me?

What habits does it create?

What does it make easier?

What does it make me stop doing?

And which parts do I want to hold onto?

That’s what keeps bringing me back to something my weird sociology teacher drilled into my head years ago.

The footage matters.

The music matters.

The edit matters.

But so does the thing carrying all of it.

The TV isn’t just framing the edit anymore.

The container is the message.

Boom. That’s McLuhan.