Disappearing Worlds: social media and the loss of identity

Marshall McLuhan, my favorite philosopher, always ascribed violent behavior to the lack of identity. The perpetrator of violence against others lacks invariably lacks a sense of self. The lack of a sense of self probably leads to self-destruction as well.

An article in the New Yorker, June 5 & 12, 2017, entitled "The Addicts Next Door" described the catastrophic toll of opioid and heroin addiction plaguing the state of West Virginia. Entire communities have been ravaged by drug overdoses and author Margaret Talbot describes the situation in harrowing detail. Parents have overdosed in front of their neighbors and their own children. One scene depicted parents falling face down to the ground at their child's softball game. If lucky, the E.M.T. (Emergency Medical Technicians) staff arrives in time to revive the addict with with a dose of Narcan or by administering CPR. The article offers no satisfactory explanation for why opioid and heroin addiction has become a preferred lifestyle for so many residents of West Virginia.

I told a friend about the article and he texted me an interesting comparison, and a possible explanation:

When Spanish got to the Caribbean the Carib Indians began hanging themselves in large numbers-- lost their world. Like W. Virginia.

Let's turn to maestro McLuhan in his last book "The Global Village," co-authored with Bruce R. Powers. This is from chapter 8, Global Robotism: The Dissatisfactions (p.97)

What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds-- imagistic, sound, or tactile-- from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out in the electronic voice, being everywhere at once in the data bank.

At that point, technology is out of control.

McLuhan died in 1980 and missed out on the development of the cellphone-- though he grasped more  completely the impact of digital technology than any of the more recent media analysts. The "informational control room" now sits in our hand and we stare at its contents incessantly. As McLuhan predicted, we are transported everywhere and vast amounts of information arrive at our brain and central nervous at the speed of light.

The total disruption of our sense of personal identity via the electronic vortex, now called the social media, has wreaked havoc-- and the West Virginia opioid/heroin catastrophe may just be a single expression of the problem.

Our old world has disappeared and countless worlds have intruded upon our existence. The new worlds lack a connection to "natural and physical laws" and leave us in a dispiriting situation, going crazy but meanwhile addicted to technology-- the beast that devours us!