Extension of the Mind

I found the “your education” section of McLuhan’s The Medium is in the Massage to be more interesting than the other sections. In this section of McLuhan’s book, he states that “Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”. The two worlds that come to mind are reality and cyberspace. In reality, the child has restrictions on what he can and cannot do. Whereas in cyberspace, the child is free from almost any restrictions and can do whatever he or she pleases. This can cause the child to have one personality in reality and another in cyberspace. One particular example would be social networks such as Facebook. The majority of user profiles are genuine and are used to network with other people. However, others were created to troll, and to mislead. This can hinder a child growth potential as to which world to follow and thrive in.    McLuhan defines extension by any one sense altering the way we thing, act, and perceive the world. The image above is the internet. The internet is an extension of the mind; it alters the way we perceive information. The internet holds an infinite amount of information. However, this information can be truthful, fabricated, obsolete or misleading. Due to these characteristics of information on the internet, different viewpoints of the same subject are possible. News websites are a perfect example; they all report the same news but have different viewpoints as to what happened and who is to blame.