Disruption by Design: How to Create Products that Disrupt and then Dominate Markets

CHAPTER 8

Messaging

…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.

—Marshall McLuhan

This much used, but little understood, introduction to McLuhan’s most influential work, Understanding Media, is very apropos for a discussion of disruptive messaging (or messaging that positively impacts the probability of achieving a disruptive innovation). Because of McLuhan’s title, and the rising awareness in that time that modern media was changing society as much as it was reflecting it, many have misinterpreted “the medium is the message” ...