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Marshall McLuhan's message - the media is you : Comments
By Malcolm King, published 25/7/2011It is McLuhan's thinking on how the media were becoming extensions of our senses that makes him relevant today
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TV has quite literally "created" a new "world", or more correctly collective mind-scape in which we now all "live".
We are quite literally amusing ourselves and the planetary ecological support systems to death.
And yet Margaret Thatcher and her disciples tell us that "there is no other way".
TV IS the message.
It was once called the Idiot Box.
It has simultaneously eliminated any kind of Real Wisdom from the collective mind and cultural possibility, and "created" an idioticized robotic "culture", which now rules the world.
A TV "culture" which is completely indifferent to the welfare of humankind, and of Earth-kind altogether.
TV destroys solitude, reflection, peace and tranquility; it is a system of subconsciously irritating interruptions, and the content of the program is irrelevant to what is occurring in the perceptual activity of consciousness. Actually, content is destroyed by the medium, and noise itself becomes the new environment. So children raised on TV grow up to prefer noisy discos to pubs where one can hear and have a conversation; they grow up to prefer excitement, interruptions, and violence rather than reading, reflection, solitude and meditation.
It isnt just the crime on TV that generates violence; it is the complete environment of instantly shifting imagery, disrupted sequences, and heightened levels of noise that amount to a violent assault on the nervous system that also contributes to our new anti-social medium of noise and violence.
To the extent that in some parts of the USA, violence, and the latent threat of random violence is quite literally "in the air".
The message thus communicated is that people thus presume that they need guns to protect themselves. Of course every new gun just adds to the collective paranoia. Which is to say that a "culture" saturated with guns and violence is already effectively dead as a crucible in which the finer human possibilities, both individually and collectively, can be nurtured - and thus bear fruit.