People are mediums themselves.
Good point. One corollary consequence of the assertion that the medium is the message is that if you want to change the message, then you change the medium.
I'm not in favour of or against any ideas in regards to art. I like to explore all options myself. In the environment that I used to be, members emphasized practice over theory. There was a lot of theory at the higher level, but the focus was the actual development of the "art". Oftentimes, theory would just collapse in the face of a broken wire, buggy code, or misbehaving sensor. There's also the issue of human nature. Some art required human participation and humans can be unpredictable. So far no theory can help us predict what they will do. A recent art installation proved this very point, as you can see in the following video.
LoL, the video. :D
I think it's very predictable that if you do an installation like this, there will always be people who are provocative about it, those who find it fun, those who see it as an observation station, in other words; all kinds of reactions. Expecting everyone to like it is pretty unrealistic. Conversely, it would be extremely creepy if everyone behaved the same way, I think.
HaHa! Yes, I have been in event management for a while myself. We've been working with artists and it was great fun. Of course, nothing runs perfect and one has to put up with all kinds of accidents and unforeseeable things. That makes good stories.
McLuhans theory - investigated from people who wanted to check the correctness of it - revealed contained contradictions and paradoxes. Quite an interesting read (the academic paper is over 100 pages long, it's German so I spare to give you the link). He had many good points as well as bad ones, to put it simply.
The interesting thing is that he was writing this stuff in the 60s, before our current mass media society. So, when his ideas are seen in that context, they're very innovative for their time.