In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, 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. -p. 8

MM starts off the first chapter with his most enduring truism “The Medium is the Message”. The “bit of a shock” he alludes to remains true, I think. One of his more salient examples which occurs at some point in UM is the relationship between bee and flower. On the level of bee or flower the process of pollination must appear as something like good natured work toward self-interested ends. However, in the case of either bee or flower, an awareness of the pollination process isn’t necessarily needed to complete it, just the drives from which the process is emergent. We are accustomed to working on the scale of drives and not necessarily processes, and we are particularly blind to processes of which we play an unacknowledged part. This is the shock I think MM is alluding to: the acknowledgement of processes that happen beyond the level of our conscious involvement.

MM goes on to discuss Automation as one example:

Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was
shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships. -pp. 8-9

To extend the metaphor of the bee to the hive, another culture “long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control”, we certainly see a process of central control, fragmentation of roles, and superficiality of relationships. Indeed we graft our own experience on the bee and call it a “worker.” MM’s assumption seems to be that people of his time and possibly ours resist understanding themselves in this way, or perhaps expect deeper involvement. Is this true? If so, is this historically novel? Does it exist in opposition to an industrial society? Does it exist in relation to family/friend dynamics(for instance, one could look to family in an industrialized world for depth involvement not achieved outside of family. Does this weaken family bonds?) What other factors or technologies exist and are ubiquitous enough now that did not exist before that amplify either fragmentation or depth involvement as regards work? Is the proliferation of electronic communication the greatest factor?