“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
– A.N. Whitehead
In reading “The Medium is the Massage”, my first instinct was to understand the piece as a uniform whole, or at least to capture the underlying themes of the texts to help me digest the reading. Immediately, I am thrown off by the title — my eyes glazed over the title, and I had mistakenly processed “massage” as “message“. This subtlety is significant, as I began to notice the allusions to hand, touch, and individualism through the various imagery that I connected to massages. The text delves deeper as a “collide-oscope” of electrical information.
The text as a whole speaks to me, which is no surprise since it very directly relates to my Millennial upbringing. As a digital native born into an intensely, technologically advanced culture, it’s difficult for me to realize just how much information is out there, and at such ease to access. I have been conditioned to unabashedly share information about myself — not seriously considering the fact that this information no longer belongs to me, as it now forever floats through the internet. My family, my neighborhood, my education… The text implies a warped meaning to these words, a stark cut away from the traditional definitions of convention. A particularly poignant redefinition is of the “child”, a so-called invention of the 17th century. Although I am a tiny bit more grown than a child, crawling at 19 years old and in college, I see myself in this reinvention of the word. Drawing parallels between the child of this absurd, electric world and the child of the “adult” world, the threat of growing up has always haunted me. Besides the obvious loss of innocence and the sole responsibility of child’s play, that expectation of getting myself together is terrifying, partly because I don’t know how to and mostly because I don’t want to.
“Mere instruction will not suffice.”
Extending the theme past education brings us to our government, the next topic that caught my attention. McLuhan is quick to compare the old versus the new, referring to the new state of obsoletism in tradition. I am conflicted as to what the author wants us to think – is the government an outdated force that has spun itself astray? “Ineffectual” and “passive entertainment” are striking ways to describe the political administration therein where our consent lies. Towards the participatory and democratic role of we as the people, it makes me wonder about what newfound powers we hold in our increasingly connected and digitized era. Social movements have been easier to reach wider audiences, some for example include the outcries in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, advocating against police brutality, stop and frisk, lenient gun control laws among many other related issues.