**2. The medium is (also) the message**

The form of a media dwells in its technological hardware. What McLuhan asserts with his legendary formula is more than the classical Aristotelian hylemorphism that postulates the nondissociation of form and content; it is actually its complete turnaround. McLuhan never said that the medium is a message as such, but only that the form of a given message could be completely different if the medium changed, e.g., if a roman law expressed in simple scriptur‐ ality is translated into mechanical scripturality at the Gutenberg Age. The first step to be taken, if we want to investigate this transformation in the meaning of the message, is to consider how this new kind of communication functions in technological terms. In other words, how the hardware determines the software. Traditionally, technicians and engineers were supposed to understand how things work and perform to their best. But if we read McLuhan correctly, it is much more than that. One could infer that their real job refers to (or at least should) the way their artifacts open a field to meaningfulness, whose options are, afterwards, constructed by socialforces.ItiswellknownnowthattheinventionofthewheelbyIncaengineersorhandymen never ended linearly in new forms of circulation and territorial policies [2,3], but was simply (but is this so simple?) used as a tool for new toys. The main difference between the Inca handymanandthe engineer of ourmedial age is thatthehandyman wasnever askedto imagine what kind of options and meanings his invention could acquire, whereas the contemporary engineer, on the contrary, has to assume this important effort. The point is that this effort is not necessary because of the universal accessibility of information, not even (!) because of the risks that technological innovations carry on; the point is, let aside that nobody else could perform this effort, this is (or should be) part of his or her scientific responsibility.

Another point should be mentioned too. We could argue that this mission is assumed by prospective studies that could be part of the education and the professional training of the engineers.Butthatisonlytheobvious, shallowpartoftheproblem.Themostimportantfunction is, in fact, to outline all the possible options opened by hardware techniques; we refer to what we could call the aesthetic part of technical investigation. When the perspective was discov‐ ered during the Quattrocento in Italy, nobody could imagine what kind of consequences this new representation technique could have in mathematics, physics, and, especially, in practi‐ cal arts like architecture. It was necessary to wait for Erwin Panofsky [4] to understand the link betweenallthesedisciplinesandarts.Ittookfivecenturiesfortherelationbetweenthisinvention and its consequences to be seriously understood. No need to say that such delays are nowa‐ days impossible to accept.
