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This paper aims to re-examine Marshall McLuhan ' s most famous aphorism – “the medium is the message” – within the context of recent sociological findings and concludes that business strategists should take heed of McLuhan’s warnings, both in their personal and professional lives. Marshall McLuhan was a sociologist of the 1970s whose observations about the impact of modern technology were quoted more widely than they were actually understood.

The article reviews recent findings on the sociological and psychological impact of digital technologies and examines them within the context of McLuhan’s theories. The article includes a basic explanation of McLuhan’s classic aphorism – “The medium is the message.”

Digital technologies promised to make the world smaller, but, in many ways, they have made us smaller. The fragmentation of audiences, more powerful tools for filtering information and the heightened availability of personal media have all led to increased polarization and a decline in empathic perspective sharing.

This article invites practicing strategists to consider the implications of these developments in their personal and professional lives and offers practical advice for doing so.

The article presents an original perspective on McLuhan’s thesis, drawing from a broad range of recent studies.

Marshall McLuhan devoted much of his life to exploring hitherto ignored psychological and social effects of technological innovation, the giant omission of Western civilization. Comprehensively aware of the power of models and metaphors, like language itself, to transform one kind of being into another, he used them playfully to organize ignorance for continuing discovery and invention rather than to categorize knowledge by establishing new concepts and theories. McLuhan demonstrated how to perceive hidden process patterns of new environments engendered by human artifacts as communication media; and he invited us to create a multi‐sensory epistemology of human experience in a new unity of thought and feeling that can anticipate the human consequences of innovation in our media ecology.

The nature of communication between machines and people is contrasted and the power of words, concepts, and models as metaphors, both to help and to hinder thinking, is discussed. The article observes how every human artefact manifests its own grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and tends to resume the character of spoken natural language through electric speed‐up. It is emphasised that new acoustic‐space process patterns, created by the electric communication environment, are superseding old visual‐space ground rules of the mechanical world. The article then considers how to harmonise these conflicting, but complementary, “natural” orders by learning to anticipate the material, mental, and social effects of our artefacts as human communication media.

It has been assumed that electronic computers and telematics are part of an electronic revolution which causes to obsolesce many of the perceptual, psychic and social cultural effects of phonetic literacy and typography and their subsequent perceptual, psychic, and social effects, particularly as they relate to the lifestyles and production techniques we associate with the seventeenth‐century new science and the mechanical Industrial Revolution. Shows that the digital computer, “the ultimate assembly line”, and its various effects represent a vast extention and amplification of centuries‐old trends, and, indeed, seem to present us with habits and attitudes at odds with those induced by older electronic media such as radio and television. Among the results of digital technologies are business‐as‐usual 24 hours a day and societal breakdown which occurs as a result of continuing acceleration and the splitting apart of human functions and human psyche.

What is new about the Nuclear Age is the total incompatibility of current thinking with the increasing scope and accelerating speed of electronic technology. Hitherto sequent events now approach simultaneity, as the new nuclear embrace merges friend with foe. Once dominant concepts and ground rules yield to new percepts and process patterns by electric speedup. But the cause of the problem also provides means for its solution, by learning to use all our faculties with their technological extensions not merely as specialists, but with comprehensive awareness as human beings.

The purpose of this paper is to use media studies as a creative impulse for critical research into practices of organization.

Through an aesthetic reflection on the use of media, an experience of organization is examined as a form of postponed judgement.

Aesthetic judgement can be helpful to establish new forms of relationships, but it is questionable if organizations are willing to stimulate this form of dis‐organizing.

Media studies in organizations can lead to emphasis on communication as a form of control, or the opening up of the organization to more chatter and noise.

Using McLuhan and media studies in the context of organization studies can lead to new insights for both.

A common charge against qualitative researchers in general and interactionist researchers in particular is that they produce descriptive, a-theoretical accounts of group life. We consider the problem of “analytic interruptus” in contemporary symbolic interactionism – that is, a failure to move beyond analyses of individual cases – and offer a potential to a solution via the pursuit of a generic social process (GSP) research agenda. A GSP approach involves developing, assessing, and revising concepts from the close scrutiny of empirical instances across diverse contexts. By considering criticisms of GSPs from feminist and postmodernist scholars, a more informed, qualified, and better-situated approach to the framework becomes possible. We argue that GSPs remain a quintessential analytical tool to explore subcultural realities and build formal theories of the social world.