A recent New York Times article about how Facebook is changing how it supports email to target younger users quoted a FB employee who said, “The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.” This person is referencing how FB e-mails differ from old, standard emails; for example, they removed the subject, cc, and bcc lines.

While this person is probably just trying to be clever for a reporter from the Times, I wouldn't be surprised if he had no clear sense of what he was actually saying. "The medium is the message" is a central thesis from Marshall McLuhan's 1964 work, Understanding Media.

McLuhan clarifies that the medium is the message "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." What's significant about the medium is not we might think of as the content, but rather the effect the medium has on us.

I'm still making my way through Understanding Media (it was a Christmas present), but I'm familiar enough with the medium thesis to happily speculate at what's actually going on with email.

What is the message of a email? What does it do? Email is casual, fast, rapid, semi-synchronous, and disconnected. (One might think connected, but, for example, it's really easy to lie in an email or a text; it's more difficult when you're in person. That strikes me as disconnected, not connected.) Whether you are writing formally for a job application or zipping an email to your friend, the message is the same — its inherent in the medium.

McLuhan distinguishes between a mediums's content and its message. Perhaps this is where our FB representative misses the point. An email is a vehicle for another medium — written text. Written text is just another medium — for speech. Speech, the medium for language, and language, the idea. (Roughly.)

So, Facebook, you think you've changed email? You've modified some semantics and removed some features, but my gut says that McLuhan would argue you've not done much at all. It's just as casual, rapid, and disconnected as it was before. Keep trying, but you've not yet changed the message.