McLuhan argued, "any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary" (p. 15). Barthes went further: he believed in myth-controlled technology since "myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language... a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain" (p. 114). These assertions suggest that both myth and media can be embodied in any technology. It also means that media are qualitatively richer than technology and quantitatively poorer, a relationship which also takes place between the signifier and the signified of myth, as Barthes observes:
A signified can have several signifiers: this is indeed the case in linguistics and psycho-analysis. It is also the case in the mythical concept: it has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers... This means that quantitatively, the concept is much poorer than the signifier, it often does nothing but re-present itself (p. 120).
When Barthes states, first, that myth is a sign which belongs to and emerges from a secondary semiological chain, and second that the sign (signifier + signified) in the first semiological chain becomes the signifier of myth in the second, whose signified stands alone, independently, he is basically saying that the content or message of a medium is always another medium. The content of a sign is another sign, for myth is after all a sign that appropriates another sign: "we can say that the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated" (Barthes, p. 119). This phenomenon also happens between media through hybridization or compounding because, as McLuhan argues, "[media] do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages" (p. 49). Furthermore, while the second semiological system or "metalanguage" (what Barthes calls "myth" or "signification") corrupts the first semiological system or "langue-object," something similar happens between media: "Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content
of the other, obscuring the operation of both" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 52). It is a dual, ambiguous effect, however, for it also happens that "the effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as 'content'" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 18).