For several reasons, I think this clip is wrong.
Marshall McLuhan’s "the medium is the message" was primarily concerned with the form of the medium, not the form of the content. In other words, it’s the method of transmission that matters, not what you’re trying to say.
However, immediately after introducing this idea, the author of the video tells us that the form of the medium–in this case the Internet–is irrelevant. That it’s nothing more than a special case of some other medium.
The author is saying that the Internet displays no unique or distinctive properties that are a result of the synergy of it’s parts. However that claim is contradictory to McLuhan’s concept.
Even if the individual parts of the Internet were indeed just as the author described them, the fact that they are connected still changes the form of the medium.
So it still means that the form of the Internet is unique and would therefore matter. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a Gutenberg Press merged with a Kinetoscope connected to another by a Telegraph. So
Secondly, the idea that the Internet only allows "non-participatory reception of information" simply because it uses pictures and words is just false. The author himself has created a participatory forum for the discussion of his idea which he has formulated to counter someone else’s. There are thousands of individual posts on his page regarding the video and I’m commenting about it on my very own blog.
Finally, what the author has done is to fundamentally misunderstand Marshall McLuhan’s idea by confusing the form of the content with the form of the medium.
In doing so, the author has decided that there are two worlds–the real one and the Internet one–and that the Internet world is clearly inferior to the real one because all it does is "simulate" participation that happens in the real world.
What the author fails to understand is that it’s not at all about simulating participation. It’s about symbolic communication.
When we insert a smiley face like this 
in an instant message, we’re not trying to recreate a human head any more than we’re trying to recreate Jesus or God when we put a crucifix on a wall. These things are symbols intended to communicate an idea or a collection of ideas.
The difference in the emoticon and a picture of the Mona Lisa is the resolution that the respective medium permits in the expression of the symbol.
In other words, if all you have is a piece of paper and a pencil, your symbol is going to look much different than if you have a block of wood and a chisel. So the form of the medium is in fact what matters.
I think a fairly strong argument could be made that emoticons represent one of several emergent new languages created by the form of the Internet.
All of this has made me think about a new model for how electronic communications work. I’m currently working on something that might help to bring some clarity to these ideas, even if it’s just for me.
