Macluhan: "Medium is the Massage"

I'm still trying to unpack the point of McLuhan's book, "Medium is the Massage".  It was a very strange composition of text and pictures.  At the end McLuhan included a comic style drawing of a son telling his father that "The environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it."  This sort of helped me understand the point of the book.  A little.  Most of it honestly went over my head so much that it is hard for me to even type about it.

It makes sense that environment impacts the way a person sees their role in the world.  If one person is raised in Beverly Hills, California and another is raised in a small rural town in Michigan, then they will have different roles in life.  Obviously.  Now let's think about an example that uses a digital medium.  If one person is raised with a computer and another is raised without a computer their roles will be different as well.  The person raised with the computer may grow up thinking that part of his identity is what he portrays on social media sites while the person raised without the computer may see that his identity is not what others perceive of him, but what he creates himself.

McLuhan stated that "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."  I'm sure that he was talking about television and media since the internet had not been made public yet, however this statement describes the effects of the internet at present.  Because the world has become such a connected sphere, it is a global village.  People can connect to others half way across the world or all the way across the world.  Digital isolation only exists in non-developed areas which are sparse.  Our world today is a global village and which impacts how we see our roles in society.