Extended Critical Analyses
- McLuhan, M., Agel, J. and Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage. Penguin.
The Medium is the Massage means that the technological platforms we use to communicate, conditions us and our societies far more profoundly than the actual content they carry. The word “massage” is used in place of “message” to emphasize that media doesn’t just carry information, it actively “works us over completely.”
According to McLuhan, all media are extensions of human faculties: the wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, and electronic media extend the nervous system. These technologies create environments that subtly condition how people think, communicate, and organize social life. The text contrasts the print era, which encouraged linear thinking, specialization, and individualism, with the electric era, which fosters simultaneity, participation, and global interconnectedness. It also argues that institutions such as education, government, and work are being transformed by electronic media, though people often fail to recognize these changes because they interpret new technologies through outdated ways of thinking. Ultimately, the book suggests that artists and intellectuals help society perceive these hidden effects by revealing the invisible structures created by media environments.
The key idea is reflected through expressive typography, fragmented composition, and heavy use of images. Instead of presenting information in a traditional linear structure, the book combines photographs, bold graphics, varying type sizes, and short disconnected statements spread across the pages. This design forces readers to experience the text in a simultaneous and participatory way rather than through orderly, sequential reading associated with print culture. The fragmented structure mirrors the fast, interconnected nature of electronic media and demonstrates McLuhan’s argument that the medium itself shapes understanding. By disrupting conventional reading habits, the book’s visual form becomes part of its message, embodying the shift from linear print thinking to the electric age of immediacy and “all-at-onceness.”
What this reference opened up most is the central question of my project: if the medium is the message, what happens when the same content passes through four different media in sequence? McLuhan observed this phenomenon at a cultural scale and made a structural claim about it. My project attempts to simulate it at the level of a single text, producing evidence pass by pass. The drift score, the ghost trail, the Filtered Out page, these are all attempts to make McLuhan’s invisible environments visible. Not through description, but through accumulation.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism deepens this by reframing circulation as a process shaped by dissemination, engagement, and recontextualisation rather than simple distribution. Together, the two references repositioned my understanding of what the project is doing. It is not tracking how content moves from point A to point B. It is tracking what each environment does to content as it passes through, and what it decides to leave behind.
- Seu, Mindy. “Cyberfeminism Index.” Cyberfeminismindex.com, cyberfeminismindex.com/.
Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index is a living feminist archive that grows through use and keeps every trace of its accumulation visible. It directly inspired the circulation log in this project. What I am borrowing is the structural logic, not the politics.
The Cyberfeminism Index is built on a single governing principle: incompleteness is not a failure of the archive, it is its argument. Seu describes the project as “always incomplete, always in progress.” Entries are added continuously, submitted by contributors around the world, and the record of that accumulation is always on display. The index does not present itself as authoritative or finished. It presents itself as a process. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. The accumulation is the work.
The formal decisions are inseparable from the conceptual position. Seu and her collaborator deliberately future-proofed the website by using as little extra technology as possible. The typeface is Arial, a system font chosen in part because it was designed by Patricia Saunders, one of few women to have designed a widely distributed typeface. Everything is stripped back and built to last, these are not neutral aesthetic choices. A site that relies on external frameworks risks becoming inaccessible as those dependencies disappear. The form performs the values. This draws a parallel to my own project, which is built as a single HTML file with no frameworks. The restraint is structural, and in that sense the two projects share a formal kinship even if the content and politics differ entirely.
Seu’s project challenges a conventional understanding of what a designed communication object is. In most graphic design practice, a project is finished when it is released. The Cyberfeminism Index refuses this. It is explicitly unfinished, explicitly collaborative, explicitly dependent on future input. This asks a question underexplored in communication design: what does it mean to design something that keeps going after you let go of it? The gaps in the index, which Seu acknowledges openly, are themselves evidence of the limits of what the archive does not yet know. The holes are part of the argument.
The most direct influence on my project is the circulation log. Before encountering Seu’s work, I thought of the log primarily as a functional feature. Seu’s practice reframed it. A log that accumulates and keeps every trace visible is not just a record. It is the argument made tangible. This led me to think of the In Circulation page differently, not as a history of what has been processed, but as evidence. Every row is a record of a platform conditioning content. Every trace is a ghost trail of transformation.
Where my project diverges from Seu’s is in authorship. The Cyberfeminism Index invites human contributors. My simulation replaces human transmission with machine processing. The log grows not through human intention but through systemic indifference. What the two projects share structurally, they separate conceptually. Seu’s archive is built by people, mine is by platforms. That distinction is what my project is trying to make visible.