Abstract

When Marshall McLuhan spoke to the artificiality of trying to separate mediated communication in his seminal book, The Medium is the Message, he was admittedly oversimplifying a very complex concept. Still, his argument that electronic technology changes our basic way of thinking about the world and that we are numb to the changes brought about by such technology even as they happen, has significant implications for knowledge communication. As college and university students and researchers use electronic media to discover, analyze, and report academic actualities and probabilities, the disImpact tinction between form and content is being increasingly blurred. Among the implications for higher education is that if professors and their students do not see or understand the impact of the design of technology on the understanding of the information presented classrooms or online, they will only support the misguided belief that knowledge is pure and free of external influence. That is to say, while most people will acknowledge contextual framework has always had a minor impact on the communication of knowledge, very few seem to understand that the design of mediated technology assaults knowledge and, in many cases, twists meaning and comprehension. This paper addresses the issue of the impact of the design of mediated communication on content and knowledge and offers suggestions for accommodating that impact to the sender’s and receiver’s mutual benefit.