The Medium is the Message McLuhan's work with literature and culture produced the revolutionary thought that "the medium is the message." In other words, cultures are changed not only by the “content” of technology, but also by the technology itself. The basic “content” of the technology is easy to recognize. The content of the railway would appear to be transportation; the content of the Internet would appear to be information. But McLuhan's idea that the medium that proclaims the "content" is itself the message is difficult to understand. In the example of the railroad, he states that "[t]he railroad did not introduce motion, transportation, the wheel, or the road into man's society, but it accelerated and expanded the scale of previous human functions, creating types of cities that were totally new and new types of work and leisure” (8). other words, in addition to providing fast and available transportation for people, the railway also radically restructured society new experiences, realizing that there are people living lives very different from theirs. A farmer in the countryside and a doctor in Philadelphia suddenly both had the opportunity to travel the country by train and consequently broaden their views of American society Railway united citizens across the country and created a new sense of nationalism (Of course, as with most technology, there were social class restrictions related to the availability of train travel, but this point is not relevant to l McLuhan's argument.) Society's view of work also changed with the railroad. It was no longer necessary to live in a city to be able to work there. One could probably argue that this created the American “suburb” as we know it… middle of paper… fundamentally related to if not essentially responsible for the French Revolution (14). De Tocqueville realized that “the typographical principles of uniformity, continuity and linearity had superimposed themselves on the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society” and gave the previously illiterate peasants a sense of unity that led to their revolt against the upper class (14 ). When farmers could read, they read the perspectives and experiences of others and were willing to fight to change their society as they knew it. Currently, our society is changing again with the onslaught of electric media, namely computers and the Internet. We must continue to analyze this technology with the understanding that the medium is the message, otherwise we will never fully understand our culture or technology's effect on it and our lives..