These insights are courtesy of journalist Benjamin Carlson, the author of the linked piece.
Here are 6 things McLuhan got right about our world.
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We live most of the time outside our bodies. “When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body,” he says here in 1977. “You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you.” By spending most of our time online, we relate to the world not as creatures of flesh and blood—but as floating images.
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Our identities are porous. When we relate to one another as massless images, instantaneously around the world, we detach from our private selves, and are submerged in other people’s cares, concerns, histories. The electronic age “has deprived people, really, of their private identity,” he says. “Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light.”
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Social media is changing us neurologically and psychologically. “The medium is the message,” his most famous dictum, says the most important change wrought by any new technology is not its content, but its form. In other words, when it comes to substantively impacting the human species, it’s not what’s said on social media that matters. What matters is that social media is part of our lives.
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AI makes job specialization irrelevant. With the rise of automation, McLuhan predicted: work and leisure become intermixed. information is monetized; self-employment rises; and retraining repeatedly for new roles becomes the new norm for our careers.
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In the global village, we all are gossips and snoops. As geographic limits break down, our curiosity about others’ dramas runs rampant. “The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business,” McLuhan says. “The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life.”
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AI makes—and remakes—information just for you. For better or worse, we no longer live in the same world of facts. Facts are presented a la carte and personalized. When you need to know something, “you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs and your problems,” McLuhan says. “And they at once Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on the bookshelf.”
With any predictions one must beware of the human tendency to find ways to fit vague predictions to reality to make them true.
1 is an interesting take but sounds a little like new age hippy shit lol. What I think is more an issue is that we exist in very strange territory compared to the primary mode of existence during virtually all of our evolution.
2 I have no idea what they’re talking about here. I don’t see how interacting with others has any affect on my identity whether I’m a floating net ghost or in person?
3 “the media is the message” is nebulous to me. I think what’s said on social media makes a big impact; e.g. online bullying, toxicity, etc. But also the use of social media is probably having all kinds of impacts in how we live. Things were different in the days before social media or even before the internet.
4 Yet to be seen but I think society is mostly set up for the rich to benefit disproportionately from any technological advances.
On item 2: You don’t see how interacting with people affects you as well as those you interact with?
On item 2: You don’t see how interacting with people affects you as well as those you interact with?
Of course I know how I am affected interacting with others…
But that’s NOT what #2 says.
Item #2 is claiming my very IDENTITY is affected. I merge with others somehow. But only online. Because I am non-corporal or something. At least that is how I read it. And I don’t think that happens at all.
As I understand the concept of “identity,” it is fairly static over time. It isn’t going to change just because I interact with someone online.
Now I might become crabby af when interacting with certain kinds of people enough times in single day. But that’s just me feeling crabby. My identity doesn’t change.
I might change beliefs if provided evidence to support it.
Both of these examples are just as true in person.
Maybe I’m just an idiot reading #2 wrong. It was super early and the ADHD meds didn’t kick in. Wouldn’t be the first time. Peace.
I agree that our identity is affected by others, but in every interaction. Online or off. It’s not always dramatic, but I would still say everyone is influenced by interacting with others. This includes the core of their identity, just like all other experiences affect and shape who you are, what you believe, etc.
To make some criticism: The first point seems to be true. But the reasoning doesn’t work. TV or radio doesn’t have the potential to do this. The second is merely a open question. The fourth point has not yet occurred. You compare a predicition with another! The fifth point is vaguely reminiscent of political correctness, but the web is precisely the place where the opposite also takes place.
TV or radio doesn’t have the potential to do this.
Really? Have you ever been on TV?
Thats was my point.
I’m not sure what your point was, but presumably it wasn’t that you’ve spent so much time being on TV that you know what it’s like better than Marshall McLuhan did. His thoughts might be difficult to understand today because for one thing we assume so much about how television works as a broadcast medium that was still questionable even as late as the 1970s. Back then there were more possibilities as to how it might evolve. Instead it was replaced, in its role as an exciting new communications medium. But the experience of being in so-called cyberspace, even this part of it, does still have a little something in common with what it was like being on television fifty years ago.
I mean, the internet can be used by nearly anyone. The classical tv, on the other hand, is limited to a very tiny group of prominent persons and a great audience of passiv listener.
In my opinion, this makes a hugh difference.
That is, like, horribly spot on.
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Three people who got everything right.
Alan Toffler and his wife Heidi were sociologists in the 1960s. They predicted the “Third Wave” and “Future Shock”
The Third Wave posited that the coming Digital Revolution would change the world as much as the switch from hunting to farming, and the jump from farming to the Industrial Era. “Future Shock” was the term they came up with to describe the social upheaval that comes when people are unwilling/unable to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
Science fiction novelist John Brunner won the 1969 Hugo award for Best Novel. “Stand On Zanzibar” is set in the early 21st Century. Brunner predicted everything from legalized pot to video games to personalized advertising to mass shooters…
McLuhan got a whole lot of stuff right, but I feel like the “global village” turned out to be a Potemkin village. We don’t concern ourselves with “everybody else’s” business. We closely watch only the tiny fraction of the world that’s magnified by its popularity until it seems like everything. The selection is wider and more diverse than it used to be in the days of television and we have more channels to choose from now, but even the most carefully curated fediverse feed is still a long way from seeing the whole world or the whole picture of any big part of it.
Such a great find! I’ll have to read this now
